Discourse Frames Research Articles

Talking ourselves up: reframing learning development to reflect our expertise

The way universities frame Learning Development (LD) has profound implications for the field’s pedagogy, status, autonomy and evolution. These variables affect the value that LD releases to staff and students. Framing involves ‘foregrounding certain perspectives and ruling out others’ to characterise a phenomenon (Jones, 2010, p.242). Learning developers’ ‘palpable reluctance’ to advocate for their expertise (Webster, 2022, p.181) contributes to the field often being framed externally. This session guided attendees on how to constructively challenge and redefine the framings at university level, using my doctoral data (Johnson, 2023). It included analysis of framing discourse about LD on UK universities’ websites, of the value of LD to students and staff in one university, and of how the two related. LD can be framed as a combination of skills development, human development and subject-embedded instruction (Hallett, 2010). The university website discourse lacked quantity and detail about the embedded framing, while strongly representing the skills framing. The skills framing correlated with stakeholders perceiving LD as delivering functional (financial) value, while the humanistic framing added social and emotional value. Only the embedded framing encouraged perceptions of LD as adding knowledge – a.k.a. epistemic value (terminology from Sheth et al., 1991, adapted for higher education [HE] by LeBlanc and Nguyen, 1999). I therefore argued LD teams should advocate for a reframing of their work which better calibrates and explains all three discourses. As the stakeholder data illustrated, this enhanced perception increases students’ and staff’s inclination to engage with LD (conditional value), leading to greater value release.

The Framing of Climate Change Discourse by Greenpeace Africa

The issue of climate change has been at the forefront of a number of nongovernmental environmental organisations, such as Greenpeace and its national branches, for instance, Greenpeace Africa (Pandey, 2015). Located in Johannesburg in South Africa, Greenpeace Africa (further – GA) aims “to bring forth the solutions which are essential to a green and peaceful future” (Greenpeace Africa, 2024). One of the major foci of GA’s environmental campaigns for a green future involves the issue of climate change. To-date, however, little is known about how GA frames its climate change communication, especially on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), such as Facebook. The present study seeks to fill the current gap in scholarship by collecting and analysing a corpus of GA’s Facebook status updates on climate change in order to shed light onto this under-researched issue. In the study, the corpus is analysed qualitatively by means of applying framing methodology (Entman, 1993, 2004, 2007, 2010). The results of the corpus analysis have revealed that GA frames its climate change communication on Facebook by a number of frames that are further discussed in the article.

The Ambiguity of Metaphor: How Polysemy Affords Multivalent Metaphor Use and Explains the Paradox of Metaphor

ABSTRACT This paper explores the suggestion (Steen, 2023a, 2023b) that most metaphor may be structurally ambiguous between deliberate and non-deliberate meanings, which in turn affords multivalent metaphor use. The paper begins by examining a sample of 56 Metaphor-Related Words in 25 examples of language use from corpus research about metaphor in discourse about cancer and the end of life (Semino et al., 2018). These data are analyzed by means of a new method proposed by Deliberate Metaphor Theory (Steen, 2023a; cf.; Reijnierse et al. 2019). Results show that all metaphors in the sample that are both polysemous and conventional can be given two interpretations, one non-deliberate and one deliberate. This ambiguity is largely corroborated by additional analysis of these same data by Wmatrix. Subsequent inclusion of all other cases from the same chapter in Semino et al. (2018) offers additional support. This finding offers a critical perspective on the idea that metaphor is a strong psychological device for figurative framing in discourse, for the structural ambiguity of most metaphor allows for multivalent metaphor use, where, in fact, most metaphor may typically be comprehended non-metaphorically (Steen, 2008, 2023a, 2023b). The ambiguity of metaphor hence also explains the paradox of metaphor.

“We Were Beaten Down”: Parents' Concerns about Children's Digital Media Use

ABSTRACTParents' concerns about children's digital media use were investigated using data from semi‐structured interviews with 17 parents of children ages five to 11 at three branches of a U.S. urban public library system. Data were analyzed using collaborative inductive thematic analysis and analyzed with the lens of culturally‐constructed anxieties about new media. The most common concerns included worries about exposure to inappropriate content, worries about digital media taking up time that children would otherwise spend engaging in more meaningful activities, concerns about safety and privacy, and worries about negative effects on children's behaviors, attitudes, and social skills. Further analysis showed parents' deeper concern for children's healthy development to underlie these narrower concerns. The authors conclude with the recommendation to shift the framing of discourse around parenting with digital media from risk protection to digital media education. Such a shift could raise awareness that framing children and digital media only in terms of risks is overly simplistic, and it could help parents come to understand that children's digital media use is not just risky but also an opportunity for children to derive educational and social benefits, and learn how to operate in a digital media‐dominated information ecosystem.

Chronotopes of Transnational Literacies: How Youth Live and Imagine Social Worlds in their Digital Media Practices

AbstractThis study explores the transnational literacies that contribute to creating online social connections among migrant youth that may support their development and navigation of life across countries. We examine how social connectedness is semiotically constructed through time–space framing among two youth of Chinese descent who were participants of a larger study of the digital media practices of young people in an urban high school. We build on the concept of chronotope (Bakhtin, 1981) and scholarship of transnational literacies to understand the space–time dimensions of digital literacy practices, specifically how youth create the spatiotemporal context or frame of reference for their actions and positionings with others across geographical distances. Using a case study approach with data from interviews and observations, we analyzed how the youth depicted their transnational social relations within particular time–space frames. Qualitative and discourse analyses of the youths' narrative accounts show that they positioned themselves in proximity with their transnational peers within particular time–space contexts that supported their actions and emotions, and how they made sense of events, issues, practices, and their own identities as transnational individuals. The youths' ideas of schooling and education, and attunement to nationalistic ideologies, were developed through multiple chronotopes in their social connections across countries. This study offers implications for how an attention to the transnational spatiotemporal frame of youths' discourse and narrative may give us a more nuanced understanding of the subjectivity, knowledge, and perspective they derive from their experiences of movement and connection across borders.

Network Flow of Campaign Discourses and News Frames: The Changing Fortunes of Twitter/X as a Conduit for Frame-Building

ABSTRACT Periodic changes continue to impact the fortunes of Twitter as a political communication and news-sharing platform, particularly among diverse individual and institutional African users. Yet few studies provide empirical insights into Twitter’s changing role in campaign communication and its influence on news frame-building across the region, mainly in Nigeria. This study bridges the gap by analysing n = 763 tweets to determine how the political campaign discourse strategies in the tweeting activities of two prominent candidates influenced the news frame-building practices of mainstream newspapers during the four months of Nigeria’s 2019 presidential campaign. Findings affirm that the Twittersphere served as a playground where candidates deployed diverse discourse frames correlating with political agendas to show their intent to integrate Twitter into their campaign communication strategies. Moreover, the candidates’ tweets contribute to the journalistic frame-building process, although the newspapers tend to focus more on frame-setting than frame-sending due to the dynamic nature of journalistic content production across individual news outlets.

“Silence is the best answer for a bully”: an exploration of humour techniques in selected Nigerian newspaper political cartoons

Abstract Newspaper political cartoons, known for their satirical nature, employ semiotic and linguistic techniques to comment on or criticise political leaders and events humorously. While previous studies on Nigerian newspaper political cartoons have focused on ideological issues and discourse frames, little attention has been given to the linguistic investigation of semiotic humour techniques in these cartoons. This study, therefore, investigates these humour techniques, utilising Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin’s General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) as the framework within a descriptive design. Three newspapers – Punch, The Guardian, and Daily Trust – were purposively selected for their regular publication of cartoons, criticising Nigeria’s politics. Eleven political cartoons were purposively selected for their semiotic and humorous depictions of Nigeria’s politics, and subjected to linguistic analysis. Six semiotic humour techniques were identified in the cartoons: exaggeration, humorous metaphor, distortion of formulaic expressions, neologism, innovative collocation, and sarcasm. These techniques were employed to satirise three governance issues in Nigeria – misgovernance, corruption and insecurity.

Weathering Words: A Cross-linguistic Analysis of Metaphorical Frames of Climate Change Discourse in English and German Online News Outlets

Climate change is undeniably a major challenge of the 21st century and those to come. While scientists agree on this, the public does not as opinions range from climate change deniers to those who devote their lives to fighting it. News media play a crucial role in shaping the public’s opinion on climate change and as they have a significant influence on the public discourse. This paper offers a cross-linguistic comparison of conceptual climate change metaphors in online news outlets from four different countries and two languages. Using conceptual metaphor analysis, I identified prevalent source domains to conceptualize the causes, effects, and responses to climate change. Overall, I found three shared metaphorical frames: war, destination, and construction, as well as additional metaphors in each language. The analysis revealed war and destination as most dominant source domains through which effects and responses are framed. This suggests news media emphasize the severity of effects and urgency to respond through creating a threatening image of climate change, which we do have the power to fight. The pervasive use of these two metaphors in both languages suggest a common understanding climate change.

Analyzing the Framing of Climate Change Discourse in Nigerian Media: Implications for Public Engagement and Policy Development

This paper aims to analyse how well the media has fared in framing climate change discourse in the Nigerian media. Some other questions that would be addressed by this paper border on the implications of this analysis of climate change discourse for public discussion and policy-making. The study may also interact in a condensed way with how previous framing of climate change discourse in the Nigerian media has impacted public opinion and policy making. This paper will serve the Nigerian community in advancing climate change discourse and influence public perspective and policy making. The goal is to furnish the readership with the knowledge necessary for constructive and productive discourse on climate change both among the governmental officials and the citizens, which would help reformulate and reconstruct policies that will attenuate the effects of climate change in the nation. The study does not merely articulate the problem but also highlights the solutions, asserting the fact that while the challenge seems insurmountable, the collective efforts of humans to address will prove useful in the end; especially as the media seeks to formulate its framing of climate change discourse in such a way as to stimulate creative thinking and generate positive public responses.

(Re)Framing abortion: the lamination of trafficking in reproductive rights discourse

ABSTRACT Human trafficking has historically been exploited for political purposes and to reify social hierarchies. Popular media and conspiracies such as QAnon have reinforced many of these myths about human trafficking. As reproductive rights have continued to be contested in the U.S. with the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the term ‘abortion trafficking’ has been introduced to leverage fears related to trafficking and unify opposition to abortion access. This article considers how ‘abortion trafficking’ reflects a tradition of laminating human trafficking onto polarizing discourse frames. Utilizing Goffman’s conception of lamination in his work on frame analysis, identification of how ‘abortion trafficking’ has been manifested in popular discourse is identified. Implications of the effects of such laminations on theory and popular sentiment are considered.

Working with constructs of inclusion for understanding teachers’ literacy practices and their impact on student learning

ABSTRACT The paper explores teachers’ language literacy practices in underprivileged, inner-city schools in Athens, Greece, and their implications for student learning and educational inclusion. The current developments of global/European and national education policy agendas on literacy and inclusion inform the research questions of the study. Bernstein’s theory of pedagogic discourse frames our analysis on the reproduction of social inequalities through schooling and informs our discussion on the discursive means and the pedagogic practices for their interruption. Findings, based on interview data and classroom observations, indicate that global discourses on inclusion, (re)articulated in the disadvantaged school settings of the study, invest the notion of inclusion with three different meanings: a. inclusion as assimilation and absorption into the dominant culture and society; b. inclusion as therapy for students’ emotional ‘traumas’; and c. inclusion as recognition of difference. We argue that these constructs of inclusion shape teaching practices that either promote or undermine student learning and empowerment.

‘Everything seems to be pushed onto the businesses’: stakeholder perceptions of the policing of business crime in Staffordshire, United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This article concerns the perceptions and policing of business crime in the Staffordshire Police area in England in 2019–2020. Based on collaborative mixed methods’ work analysis of business crime in Staffordshire, it considers the framing of official discourse, and how it is applied and understood in police practice. Using 74 qualitative interviews with small business owners and access to police data, the research team considered how business crime was framed by officials and stakeholders. Noting there is something of a disconnect between officials and stakeholders the paper suggests that this reveals the conceptual and practical limitations of policing business crime as a form of commercial victimisation. This is due, the paper argues, to the conceptual ambiguity of the contemporary official police discourse of business crime which, in praxis is ill-defined and largely restricted to a more obvious form of retail crime. It suggests that greater consideration and conceptual refinement of the varied nature of business and enterprise is necessary if authorities truly wish to recognise the varied ways in which commercial activity and victimisation intersect. Recognising these intersections should enable police and the CJS to provide more effective responses to stakeholders and the wide range of businesses that face varied and multifaceted victimisation.

Between a Burden and Green Technology: Rishi Sunak’s Framing of Climate Change Discourse on Facebook and X (Twitter)

The issue of climate change has been one of the critical foci of political discourse worldwide (Wagner, 2023). Given that political debates and political discourse are quite often communicated on Social Networking Sites (SNSs), for instance, Facebook and X (Araújo & Prior, 2021), it appears highly relevant to tap into political actors’ discourse on SNSs that addresses the issue of climate change. Guided by the importance of SNSs in political discourse on climate change, the present article introduces and discusses a study on how Rishi Sunak, the current prime minister of the United Kingdom (the UK), frames the issue of climate change on his official Facebook and X accounts. Specifically, the aim of the study was to identify the types of frames used in Sunak’s climate change discourse in a corpus of his posts on Facebook and X. The corpus was collected and analysed in accordance with the methodology proposed and developed by Entman (2007). The results of the analysis revealed that Sunak’s framing of climate change involved a pragmatic economy-oriented aspect, which was presented discursively by imparting it a personalised dimension that involved multimodality. In particular, it was discovered that Sunak frequently framed the issue of climate change via the frames Burden and Green Technology. The findings were discussed in conjunction with the prior research on framing in climate change discourse.

Investigating the effects of discipline and first-language backgrounds on ITAs’ instructional discourse patterns

Using a multidimensional analysis (MDA), this study aimed to increase the understanding of international teaching assistants’ (ITAs’) instructional language use by analyzing co-occurring linguistic features during their mock-teaching presentations in ITA assessment. With this purpose, the study examined the effects of ITAs’ proficiency levels, disciplines, and first-language backgrounds on their discourse patterns. The data comprised a corpus of 165 prospective ITAs’ mock-teaching presentations in ITA assessment. Based on the two dimensions of the twenty-six linguistic features found prevalent in university classroom talk (Csomay, 2005), an additive MDA was performed. Overall, the mock-teaching presentations of more proficient ITAs involved more contextual, directive, and personalized framing discourse features, with interaction effects for the ITAs’ disciplines and first-language backgrounds. The study discusses the implications for ITA training and assessment and directions for future studies. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

Religio-temporal framing and religio-social synchronization in family discourse in Saudi Arabia

Studies on time and timing in language often adopt psychological or cognitive perspectives. This work aims to study the relationship between time, religion, and family discourse. An interactional sociolinguistic approach was used to collect data from spontaneous family interactions to study how religious activities govern how family members in Saudi Arabia organize their day and simultaneously how different times of day are organized though religious activities. This study draws on Gordon’s study of family discourse, Van Leeuwen’s concepts of timing and Goffman’s concept of framing to investigate how family members organize their time in what can be referred to as religio-temporal framing and religio-social synchronization, and how this plays a role in the co-construction of Muslim identity.

Media Influence on Brain Drain Perceptions: An In-Depth Examination of Framing Dynamics

This study examines the profound impact of media on shaping public perceptions of brain drain, a globally significant issue with far-reaching implications for politics, society, and the economy, particularly in developing countries such as Albania. Focusing specifically on skilled professionals’ migration in pursuit of enhanced opportunities, the research scrutinizes how media influences their decisions to emigrate, analyzing news coverage and perspectives on migration as factors influencing economic status and quality of life.</p><p>Against the backdrop of a burgeoning body of scholarly research highlighting the media’s substantial influence on public perceptions and attitudes toward migration, this study contributes by delving into the intricate relationship between media narratives and brain drain perceptions. It examines news coverage and occupation trends, paying special attention to potential stereotypes reinforcing the dichotomy of “skilled leaving” versus “unskilled staying.” The analytical framework integrates concepts from framing, agenda-setting, social constructivism, and critical discourse on globalization perspectives.Empirical data have been collected from a comprehensive sample of 50 Albanian news articles specifically related to brain drain. The synthesis of theoretical approaches and existing scientific studies in this domain complements the data collection. The findings shed light on the media’s capacity to shape perceptions of migration, particularly its influence on professions and quality standards. The study emphasizes the imperative of balanced and objective framing in media discourse to mitigate biases against professionals opting to remain in their home countries. Anticipated contributions include nuanced insights into the complex relationship between media, brain drain, and public perceptions, adding depth to the existing literature.

Using word embeddings for immigrant and refugee stereotype quantification in a diachronic and multilingual setting

Word embeddings are efficient machine-learning-based representations of human language used in many Natural Language Processing tasks nowadays. Due to their ability to learn underlying word association patterns present in large volumes of data, it is possible to observe various sociolinguistic phenomena in the embedding semantic space, such as social stereotypes. The use of stereotypical framing in discourse can be detrimental and induce misconceptions about certain groups, such as immigrants and refugees, especially when used by media and politicians in public discourse. In this paper, we use word embeddings to investigate immigrant and refugee stereotypes in a multilingual and diachronic setting. We analyze the Danish, Dutch, English, and Spanish portions of four different multilingual corpora of political discourse, covering the 1997–2018 period. Then, we measure the effect of sociopolitical variables such as the number of offences committed and the size of the refugee and immigrant groups in the host country over our measurements of stereotypical association using the Bayesian multilevel framework. Our results indicate the presence of stereotypical associations towards both immigrants and refugees for all 4 languages, and that the immigrants are overall more strongly associated with the stereotypical frames than refugees.

(In)visibilising pregnancy loss in Southern Malawi

Miscarriages, stillbirths and neonatal deaths have received limited attention in global health programmes and research, even though pregnancy loss is common, traumatic and stigmatised. This paper seeks to illuminate lived experiences of pregnancy loss in southern Malawi, drawing on findings from semi-structured interviews and focus groups with women who have experienced loss, health professionals and community members, and observations of maternity care. Combining thematic and discourse analysis, we show how societal and medical discourses frame women as responsible for (failed) reproduction, and restrict possibilities to speak about, and respond to, loss. Some accounts and (care) practices invisibilise loss and associated suffering. However, invisibilisation may also be intended as support, and underscores rather than denies the social significance of parenthood. Other accounts (e.g. women emphasising faith and acceptance) constitute moral survival strategies to avoid the acquisition of a ‘spoiled identity’. We conclude that societal and medical discourses of loss enact stigmatised, subaltern subject positions for women experiencing pregnancy loss, create social suffering, and amount to a form of structural violence. Programmes and interventions should change these discourses.

Translating climate risk assessments into more effective adaptation decision-making: The importance of social and political aspects of place-based climate risk

Climate risk continues to be framed ostensibly in terms of physical, socio-economic and/or ecological risks, as evidenced in the 2012 and 2017 UK Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) evidence reports. This article argues that framing climate risk in this way remains problematic for the science-policy process, particularly in ensuring adequate climate risk assessment information translates into more effective adaptation decision-making. We argue how climate risk assessments need to further consider the social and political aspects of place-based climate risk to ensure more effective adaptation policy outcomes. Using a discourse analysis of the CCRA3 Technical Report methods chapter published in June 2021, we discuss three critical themes around how climate risk is currently framed within the Technical Report methods chapter. These are (i) the over-reliance on reductive methodological framing of assessing climate risk through ‘urgency scores’; (ii) the idea of what constitutes ‘opportunity’; and (iii) the framing of transformational adaptation discourses through the lens of climate risk. To conclude, we suggest that to move beyond assessing risk solely in terms of biophysical and socio-economic risk, a greater emphasis on the social and political contexts of ‘place-based’ risk needs to be central to climate change risk assessments.

A comparative study of the electoral rhetoric of extreme right-wing parties in Germany and Russia

This article compares the electoral rhetoric of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) parties through the prism of the level of antagonization and the parties’ point of view on topical social issues. Discourse analysis is conducted using discourse frames and blocks, allowing formalizing the comparison between texts in different languages. The sample is based on party videos published online in April — May 2021 in the run-up to the upcoming federal elections in both countries. The LDPR uses more antagonistic rhetoric, especially against Western countries and Ukraine. The AfD uses we to unite its electorate, seeing the German and European establishment as its opponents, as well as organizations with an international agenda, including the Greens and the Antifa movement. Both parties raise important social issues such as immigration, digitalization, political freedoms, and national identity, but differences in emphasis emerge. The AfD is more likely to raise issues of economic freedom for business and the defense of German burgher culture against the leftist agenda, while the LDPR is focused on supporting Russian foreign policy and Russian culture against Western globalism. The authors also emphasize that modern far-right parties support democratic principles. Nationalism remains central to far-right ideology, but it is drifting towards democracy under the influence of sociocultural processes. The study aims to improve understanding of the dynamics of far-right political discourse in Germany and Russia. The theoretical developments allow us to expand the application of discourse analysis of political rhetoric.