Ideological Framing Research Articles

Scaling the value of multilingualism: ‘Common-sense’ narratives of growth and inequality in an expert report to the U.S. Congress

I examine the powerful institutional scaling project of the 2017 American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education for the 21st Century. I analyze the scalar configurations emerging in the report’s narrative argumentation with the goal of denaturalizing its scale-making narratives in the production of a ‘common-sense’ regimentation of the value of language learning and multilingualism in the United States. These configurations show how social inequalities in access to language learning are reinforced through the ideologically mapped categorizations of language to sociocultural domains and kinds of speakers. Nomically- and reportively-calibrated, future-oriented narratives present figurations of growth and progress that mix nationalist ideologies of US expansionism, neoliberal and raciolinguistic logics, and even utopian visions. By focusing on scale, and in particular on interscalar processes of comparison, the resonances across these sometimes contradictory ideological frames are brought into focus.

The use of intersectional tactics by Tunisia’s multicultural movement to build social capital and sustain collective action: It is not what we say or think that defines us but what we do

ABSTRACT Multicultural movements can pursue strategies, like utilizing intersectionality, to overcome collective action problems created by diversity. Scholarship has shown how intersectionality has inspired the creation of common ideological frames among marginalized groups who come to see their causes as intertwined, but such rhetoric is insufficient for sustaining collective action when social capital is lacking. This is relevant in contexts where activists have never collaborated such as a democratic transition. Activists need to see that others practice what they preach so that trust can develop across communal networks. Intersectionality, as I will demonstrate, also inspires social-movement tactics that target intersectional minorities as beneficiaries and encourages activists from different backgrounds to coordinate resources. This builds social capital by strengthening trust and reciprocity across social networks – thereby, sustaining collective action. To demonstrate this, I analysed collective action processes within Tunisia’s multicultural movement after the revolution in 2010 by using historical process tracing and elite interviews. I show how a diverse movement representing women, racial minorities, migrants, and the LGBTQ community utilized intersectional tactics to build social capital and sustain collective action during a democratic transition.

Colonial legacies and the British geological survey in cold war South Asia: 1960s–1980s

ABSTRACT This article explores change and continuity in the institutional objectives and actions of the British Geological Survey across independent South Asian countries, namely India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, and Burma/Myanmar. By focusing on this geographical space from the 1960s, the article tells a political tale of adjustment, in which the colonial background of the British presence in the region was overlain by the Cold War foreground of international competition. The Geological Survey had the required pedigree to prolong the British presence in important technical arenas of these emerging nation-states, albeit within the redefined parameters of development, overlapping interests, and competing benefits. The article sketches the Survey’s history of exchange and collaboration across South Asian countries (except Bhutan), as its projects adapted to national preferences and global pressures. It traces how and why its proposals prioritised certain interactions over others and tracks the ways-and-means through which it pursued geological and attendant commercial aims. The article also attempts to situate these interplays within regional and ideological frames, within which politically conscious technocrats sought capital and influence to reorient earth science objectives so that these could simultaneously accrue national products and generate neo-colonial prestige.

Why an Alignment of Hypothesis-Formulation and Theorization with Cultural and Cross-Cultural Frames of Reference is Required: A Rough Guide to Better Hypothesis-Formulation and Theorization

In this paper, we proposition and champion the idea that theorization and hypothesis building, both of which form an intrinsic and a crucial part of formal scientific method, must be linked and tied to the concepts of cultural frame of reference, and cross-cultural frames of reference, two concepts that we had mooted in our previous papers. This approach, we argue, is necessary, in order that scientific concepts be better grasped and more thoroughly understood by the masses, and by the common public. We therefore, present a brief recapitulation of these two concepts besides introducing, and briefly explaining the twin ideas and the twin concepts of ideological frame of reference, and epistemological frame of reference as well. We also recapitulate and overview our earlier concepts of irreducible simplicity, “Continuous zero-based reassessment of assumptions, hypotheses and methods”, and structured apperception tests for socio- cultural change, and integrate them into the tenets of this paper. Last but not the least, we explain how all these concepts can lead to a percolation of scientific ideas, and a scientific temper among the masses, and lead us to what we have always called, “scientific progress at the speed of light.” These approaches and techniques must be followed as far as practically possible, and exceptions justified on a case to case basis.

Ideological framing of sign languages and their users in the South African press

Abstract This exploratory study provides an overview of prominent themes pertaining to portrayals of sign languages (SLs) and Deaf people in the South African press (2011–2019), as well as an analysis of a subset of articles to illustrate the discursive constructions of each of the prominent ideological framings. The findings of the paper suggest that many ways of representing South African Sign Language (SASL) and their users align with international trends. The two most prominent ideological framings are the medical/disability model and the linguistic minority model. Within the medical model, SLs are seen as inferior means of communication used by a disabled minority. Within the linguistic minority framework SLs are regarded as natural, legitimate languages deserving equal status to spoken languages. The paper also identifies an ideological framing that is not predicted by the international literature, coined here as ‘diversity tokenism’. Diversity tokenism is when SL is mentioned only to increase perceived diversity, where diversity is a commodity that holds social capital. This portrayal of SASL seems to be increasing and holds a warning: although SASL users have received official recognition and rights through the recent declaration of SASL as an official language, it might not be the end of the battle to ensure that users of SASL can live out their linguistic citizenship.

Maqashid Quran’s critical view on Indonesian Ulema Council’s fatwa on Halal certification of COVID-19 vaccine

This research aims to examine the Indonesian Ulema Council’s (MUI) fatwa strategy on COVID-19 vaccination booster, which employed religious narrations and laboratory test evidence to justify its arguments. Religious texts become ideological frames that are legitimate and effective in influencing the human senses. This study uses maqashid al-Qur’an as approach. Hence, the use of text of the Qur’an, hadith, and quotations from various ulema’s opinions elucidates the vaccination aim under Islamic law. Based on the MUI fatwa, the primary purpose of the vaccinations is for the sake of national benefits, whereas, from the perspective of maqashid al-Qur’an, it mainly leads to the preservation of the Indonesian people’s life as a whole. The COVID-19 vaccination carried out in Indonesia is for curative purposes; consequently, this programme is classified into the daruriyah [urgent] category. The results revealed that religious authority plays a crucial role in persuading its adherents.Contribution: This research shows that interpreting the Qur’anic verses using the maqashid theory should also be integrated with a scientific approach for the benefit of humanity.

Shared concerns versus ideological preferences: The New York Times’ coverage of two Olympics games held in the global health crisis

The Olympic Games are often framed by the U.S. media as political events, with the media’s preference for democratic political systems, while global health crises are often framed in a similar way, demonstrating shared concerns about human interests. When the Olympics occur during a global health crisis, a tension emerges between the ideological framing of the Olympics and the shared concern for human interests in media coverage. By analyzing New York Times coverage of the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics and the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, this study aims to show how ideological preferences in Olympic coverage interact with shared concerns about health crises. Furthermore, the analysis of this interaction leads to a rethinking of traditional journalistic norms that view journalists as detached observers.

Transitivity System and Ideological Framing in News Headlines Reporting Gender-based Violence in Nigeria

Gender-based violence, encompassing domestic abuse, sexual assault, and femicide, remains an enduring and widespread issue in Nigeria. This study aims to examine the transitivity system and ideology present in news headlines reporting gender-based violence in Nigeria. While adopting Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) Ideational Metafunction of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as the theoretical framework, the study uses content analysis method which includes both qualitative and quantitative approaches in the analysis of the data. 20 news headlines each published between May and August, 2022 on the official websites of two prominent mainstream media in Nigeria – The Punch and Nigerian Tribune – are purposively selected for this study, making a total of 40 news headlines. The analysis of transitivity system in The Punch online news revealed that thirty (30) processes are employed in the twenty (20) news headlines depicting crime committed against women in Nigeria selected from the newspaper. Twenty-nine (96.7%) of these processes are material process, while one (3.3%) is behavioural process. The prevailing occurrence of material process is also evident in the news headlines selected from Nigerian Tribune. In Nigerian Tribune, twenty-five (25) processes are deployed across the twenty (20) selected news headlines; material process appears twenty-four times (96%), while verbal process appears only once (4%). The dominant use of material process in the selected news headlines permits both media houses – The Punch and Nigerian Tribune – to identify and describe various physical and violent actions that were taken against Nigerian women, and also to identify actions taken by the law enforcement agencies to ensure justice for the victims of crime. The analysis further highlighted a representation of gender roles and power dynamics by revealing that all the material processes which are related to violence, such as ‘rape’, ‘shot’, ‘abducts’, ‘kills’, and ‘punches’, are linked with the male. Hence, men are portrayed as perpetrators of violent crimes while women are represented as the victims; women are portrayed as vulnerable, gang-raped, raped, shot, killed and stabbed. It was also discovered that women, along with related entities, are often used in news headlines to perform the participant role of goal, thereby implying an ideological representation that positions women as susceptible targets of violent crimes. This study therefore concludes that Nigerian media outlets primarily deploy material processes and goal participant roles of the transitivity system to present an amplified and sensational portrayal of various physical and aggressive actions inflicted upon women and young girls in Nigeria.

Frame plurality and ‘or/rationality’: a dialogic approach to the behavioral state

Abstract Consequentialist theories of the behavioral state are largely grounded in satisfying self-interested preferences through policies that employ choice architecture and related strategies to encourage rational decision-making. Even when allowing for free choice, however, this stance tends to be characterized by a paternalistic ‘view from nowhere’ that may not fully accommodate a plurality of values. Alternative approaches such as contractarianism position policy in the context of marketplace exchange, bolstered by shared beliefs in the legitimacy of social institutions. Yet this view may not sufficiently consider issues of asymmetric access, or ideological frames that do not see these institutions as legitimate. To address these deficits, we propose the value of a dialogical approach to behavioral public policy that facilitates collaborative engagement and behavioral justice to redress asymmetries and inequities through a more discursive approach, which builds on practices employed by design for public policy. In so doing, this political theory suggests an actionable counterpoint to paternalistic and competition-based conceptions of the State to address frame plurality and increase the potential for system equity.

Shades of whiteness

This study examines the appropriation of religious symbols by the Nordic Alt-Right over the last decade, focusing on their use for völkisch identity construction around whiteness. It locates this signification historically, both before and during the Third Reich, to reveal a complex genealogy complicated by racial ideals, nationalistic agendas and magical thinking. Analysis centres around a selection of symbols – ranging from various Norse runes to the Valknut, the Sonnenrad and the swastika – used both explicitly and in more private contexts by members of the Nordic Alt-Right, with special attention focused on two groups that are active today, the Nordic Resistance Movement and the Soldiers of Odin. This opens a discussion on the semiotic range of appropriation itself, in order to expose how it is operative in different ways and on different levels, not only in terms of cultural borrowing or contestations of meaning but as an appropriation of ideological frames and systems of belief.

Ideological Framing and Polarization in Imran Khan’s Speech at UNGA on 27th September 2019: A Political Discourse Analysis

The aim of this study is to critically analyze the components of the speech given by Imran Khan, the 22nd Prime Minister of Pakistan, during the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on September 27, 2019. Van Dijk's (1997) Political Discourse Analysis framework was employed to examine how politicians persuade their audience, propagate their ideologies, and construct in-group and out-group divisions in their speeches. The study sought to achieve its objectives by analyzing both macro and micro structures in the speech and exploring the underlying agenda behind the utilization of these discourse structures. The qualitative data consisted of the English transcript of the speech, totaling approximately 2,577 words. NVIVO software and Dijk's Political Discourse Analysis framework were employed for the analysis of the speech. The findings of the study revealed that the macro elements in the speech provided an overview of national, regional, and global issues such as climate change, money laundering, Islamophobia, and the Kashmir conflict. Through the use of microstructural elements, the speaker effectively expressed his ideological and political beliefs regarding these aforementioned issues. In summary, this research examined Imran Khan's UNGA speech through the lens of discourse structures, shedding light on the macro and micro elements utilized by the speaker to convey his perspective on various socio-political topics.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict as a discursive continuum: A comparative study of Business Today and New York Times using an extended corpus-based discourse-historical approach

This paper presents a comparative discourse analysis of media representations of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in the American newspaper New York Times and the Indian newspaper Business Today. Using an extended corpus-based discourse-historical approach incorporating tools from critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, the study identifies key differences in main themes, discursive strategies, and linguistic means modulated by each nation’s geopolitics. The analysis reveals New York Times constructs the conflict predominantly as a moral and political crisis, employing critical language and ideological framing of Russia as the villain versus Ukraine as the victim. In contrast, Business Today approaches the conflict neutrally as an economic issue with pragmatic implications for India, avoiding explicit judgments and moral evaluations. While reflecting different ideological positions, the divergent framings and discursive strategies demonstrate the traditional “us versus them” dichotomy is an oversimplification. Through nuanced linguistic analysis of modal verbs, metaphors, analogies, hyperboles, and rhetorical questions, the study shows how historical relations, geopolitical interests, economic ties and cultural values create a complex discursive continuum rather than a static binary. By extending discourse-historical analysis, the paper advocates more pluralistic, self-reflexive journalism to enable nuanced policy debates attuned to on-the-ground realities, not just propagandistic binaries.

Self-Transcendence and the Pursuit of Happiness

This philosophical investigation is motivated by the common association between happiness and self-transcendence, and a question posed by Freud: “Why is it so hard for men to be happy?” I consider the answers given in three key texts from the psychoanalytic tradition, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, and Abraham Maslow’s The Farther Reaches of Human Nature. Based on a distinction between opposing forms of self-transcendence, ego-actualisation and ego-dissolution, the authors articulate the relation between self-transcendence and happiness in different, but equally unsatisfactory, ways. In all three texts, a dominant ideological framing is discernible, which prioritises the present/positive and ignores the work of the absent/negative, ironically leaving us with a sense of futility concerning the pursuit of happiness. I propose that an approach influenced by Lacanian ideas, which acknowledges the role played by unhappiness in producing happiness, plausibly challenges the traditional conception of happiness that places it out of human reach as the effect of a perfectly self-transcendent state. Instead, understood as the effect of resistance to the notion of self-transcendence as self-perfection, happiness, while still difficult to achieve because it requires another kind of self-transcendence, becomes attainable here and now by ordinary individuals.

Variant Rebellions: Psychic Compromise in Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack

Abstract: This paper explores certain fundamental aspects of melodramatic theatricality used to depict the colonial world on the London stage at the turn of the century. As melodrama was a hybrid of comedy, tragedy, pantomime, and sentimentalism, the juxtaposition of a variety of these compositional strategies opens up the interpretation of John Fawcett's successful pantomime Obi; or Three-Fingered Jack (1800) and its later 1830 melodramatic adaptation by William Murray. As examples of racial melodramas, these plays disrupt the otherwise conventional moral polarity typical of melodramas by situating archetypal melodramatic characters in a morally ambiguous, theatrically conceptualized colonial space. Stage apparatus and performance were but two aspects of melodramatic theatricality that were deployed to recreate the colonial world. The basic argument in this paper explores the contrary pulls within these plays. On the one hand, the spectators' cathartic celebration of the rebels' expulsion at the end of the play entrenches their identification with British imperial ideology by arousing collective feelings of patriotism, thus consolidating the national identity of spectators as British imperialists. On the other hand, the visuals and the music that depict the colonial social order of a slave colony and the heroic feats of the rebel slave opened up a space of possible critique of British imperial ventures. These contrary drives within the melodramatic form are reformulated in terms of a "psychic compromise" in which the act of rebellion is endorsed for its dramatic potential to arouse fantasies of heroic revolt but is ultimately compromised in a larger ideological frame that celebrates the empire and the reconstitution of colonial order. This paper offers insights into the popular cultural perception of the empire, obliquely illuminating the larger historical processes of empire building during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Kaczyński’s Poland and Orbán’s Hungary: Different Forms of Autocracy with Common Right-Wing Frames in the EU

This paper discusses the regimes of Jarosław Kaczyński in Poland (2015–) and Viktor Orbán in Hungary (2010–) from the perspective of a curious paradox: they are very different in functioning but adhere to right-wing ideological frames that are very similar. First, we argue for a dual-level approach to understanding the formal and informal nature of these regimes, and we identify Poland as a conservative autocratic attempt and Hungary as an established patronal autocracy. After a comparative analysis of the two systems, we analyze the regimes’ common ideological frames and explain how legitimacy panels fit the purposes of an ideology-driven regime (Poland) and an ideology-applying one (Hungary). Finally, the analysis is used to explain the divergent responses of the Polish and the Hungarian regimes to the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which also brought the mutual relations of the two de-democratizing countries in the European Union to a breaking point.

Lost in (Mis)Translation: Paratextual Framing in Selected Arabic Translations of Orwell’s Animal Farm

Paratextuality plays a key role in cultural stereotyping and ideological framing of the translated texts and pre-positions the reader by setting certain expectations (Baker 2006). They also serve as a tool of adaptation (Genette 1997), superimposing certain interpretations of the author’s intentions and ideologies. Here, George Orwell’s Animal Farm is an optimum example. The rising interest in its Arabic translation, especially in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings bears on the politicized readings of the text, as manifested in the paratextual elements accompanying its translations. The present study investigates the role of paratextual renderings of Animal Farm in mainstreaming ideological frames and cultural stereotypes about the narrative. Drawing on Genette (1997), we close-read peritexts of the Arabic translations and probe potential paratextual functions. So far, sixteen plus Arabic translations of the novel have been published. This recent translational influx reflects, besides literary and cultural significance of the novella, an increasing interest in reading it as symbolizing the recent socio-political change. As a process where content transfer and transform(ation) overlap, translation involves an inevitable degree of bias (Venuti 2012). Orwell’s novella was largely appropriated by Arabic translators as a political manifesto, to the disregard of its other literary and cultural valances. For Arab readership, Animal Farm belongs to a long line of allegorical tales, not so much different from works like Kalila wa Dimna (The Panchatantra), where the political largely prevails over the literary. The present study thus draws on Lefevere (1992), Genette (1997), Kress and van Leeuwen (2006), Van Dijk (2003), and Baker (2006) in exploring paratextual elements as potential sites for translatorial/editorial intervention, ideological framing, and cultural appropriation of the translated text. It investigates the use of paratextual elements as sites for contestation of agency and validity, and also for interpretive foreclosure in ways that suppress/miss potential layers of meaning in the novella.

Ideological Framing, Mosques, and Conflict: Bargaining Position of Salafi Movement in Lombok, East Indonesia

Ideological Framing, Mosques, and Conflict: Bargaining Position of Salafi Movement in Lombok, East Indonesia

White Clubwomen in the Progressive Era South and Ideological Framings of Education: Lessons for the Present

White Clubwomen in the Progressive Era South and Ideological Framings of Education: Lessons for the Present

국악-재즈 크로스오버와 전통 확장 이데올로기

Since the late 20th century, plenty of collaborative works among Korean traditional musicians and jazz performers have emerged in the realm of “changjak gugak (lit. creative national music).” In 2020s, within the scene of traditional music-based crossover works, “elite” jazz musicians’ active participation and the use of musical elements of jazz music have become more and more visible.
 During the same period, the discourses of “expansion,” “popularization,” and/or “modernization” of tradition has constantly circulated and consumed as a bundle of “spirit of the times.” Those discourses became intertwined together and thereby produced and reproduced two differentiated ideological time-spaces of “gugak musicians and listeners-premodern era-oldness-Korean (traditional) culture/music” and “the public(laymen)-modern times-newness-Western culture/music.” Because of these ideological frames, a variety of new gugak-jazz works constructed by a set of conventionalized and oft-outdated jazz performance skills and composing styles are often automatically categorized as examples of “musical expansion/modernization/ popularization” of traditional music that offer new kinds of experience, Many of those gugak-jazz crossover works which are totally not new in terms of artistic device are represented as new things “inertially” due to this existence of state-driven ideological discourses that semiotically connect the Western music to newness, which result in the crossover musicians’ benefit from the gugak-related financial aid programs offered by the state. Those discourses often ideologically dominate traditional music performers and related participants, thus the established style of gugak pieces with jazz-related elements are introduced as a “new expansion” of traditional music by musicians themselves as well as gugak-related mass media. This paper critically argues that such discursive convention that often unfairly elevates all kinds of gugak-jazz crossover works should be reconsidered and productively deconstructed for better understanding and critic of crossover gugak works.

Muslim preachers’ pandemics related discourses within social media: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis

Pandemics have been extensively represented in different discourse genres including journalistic discourse, media discourse, medical discourse, social media discourse, and academic discourse. This study explores the representation of COVID-19, Swine flu, and Monkey pox in the Arab Muslim preachers’ discourses on Twitter and Facebook. The Muslim preachers’ discourses remain one of the influential discourses that informs the ideology of its believers, as it is largely based on the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. The data set of 538 postings was generated through an extended observation of purposively recruited Arab Muslim non-mainstream scholars’ postings on Facebook and Twitter from March 2019 to August 2022. The data were analyzed using corpus-based critical discourse analysis. The twofold analytical lens involving CL and CDA revealed that Muslim preachers frequently used ideological semantic patterns in communicating to the Muslim society at large regarding the pandemics. The utilized semantic patterns emerged as embedded in certain ideological frames established in the Islamic authoritative discourses of the Quran and the Hadiths of Prophet Muhammad. In their ideological representation of the pandemics, Muslim preachers framed the entire three pandemics mostly as the wrath of God. Religious scholars’ postings cannot be considered an account of teaching and preaching; rather, they merely consume and produce Islamic ideology in a way to manipulate and influence Muslims’ knowledge of existing reality by adding new meanings in line with the chosen ideological frames.