Master Frame Research Articles

'Zoonati' vs. 'epistemic tresspasers': Science identity in contentious online advocacy campaigns on the origins of SARS-CoV-2.

This article explores how science is mobilized as a collective identity, normative ideal, and instrumental tactic in contentious online global advocacy campaigns on the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It incorporates qualitative analysis of over 2300 public Twitter postings by core zoonosis and lab origin proponents who identify as scientists. These online exchanges provide a real-time window into how the collective identity of scientist is constructed and mobilized as a master frame. Similarly, this paper explores ways in which the boundaries of science, conspiracy, and politics are set and contested in a context of complex and fast-moving global events.

Antagonistic framing and the social exclusion of Rohingya in Myanmar’s parliamentary discourses (2011–2021)

ABSTRACT Antagonistic frames about minority groups are hard to dislodge. Their persistence limits the scope for conflict resolution in divided societies. The parliament that surfaced in Myanmar during a decade of opening (2011–2021) presents a case for studying how emerging legislators develop strategies for minority exclusion. Through a frame analysis of parliamentary discourses focused on the Rohingya communities across two legislatures, we reconstruct how lawmakers framed such a vulnerable group during plenary debates. We detected five adversarial frames deployed by lawmakers regardless of their ethnoreligious background or party affiliation: (1) denial, (2) invasion, (3) inhospitality, (4) racist othering, (5) sexualized demonization. We found a clear alignment with popular master frames deeply embedded in Myanmar society. We further argue that such antagonistic framing developed in parliament served two purposes: it delegitimized the Rohingya as an ‘outgroup’ in official discourse while seeking to homogenize the rest of society despite entrenched ethnoreligious divisions.

The Framing of Minority Threat and Moralization to Criminalize Behavior: The Case of Cannabis in the Early 20th Century

Abstract Understanding why particular behavior is encoded in law or other systems of rules has been a core topic of sociology since its inception. Although differing rhetorical frames have been identified in policy debates, little research directly links such rhetoric and policy passage. Centering framing theory, we use the case of U.S. cannabis criminalization via mixed-methods content analyses of 9,707 nationwide newspaper articles and event history analysis of state-level criminalization to make several contributions. First, we go beyond describing rhetorical frames, demonstrating that core framing tasks were associated with spatial and temporal state-level cannabis law passage. Second, we emphasize that consolidation of two “master frames,” legal and racial, are particularly pertinent to criminalization and permit incorporation of rhetorical minority threat into framing. Third, an overreliance on population-based minority threat exists in the literature; however, threat can operate absent minority groups. While demonstrating the effect of vilification of Mexican people, we show that a heterogeneous “othering” of cannabis, by attaching threat to numerous minority groups, was significant for cannabis criminalization, regardless of minority groups’ actual presence. In addition to interrogating longstanding assumptions regarding cannabis criminalization, our analyses demonstrate the importance of framing and rhetorical racial threat in the social construction of law.

Letter Writing and Legal Consciousness during World War I

Abstract This article explores how ordinary Americans thought about law during World War I by examining 119 letters to Congress regarding charges under the Espionage Act. These letters are a product of their time and shed new light on our understanding of the first Red Scare. This lens of legal consciousness explains how people remain within established modes of engagement, rather than either withdrawing or becoming violent, as is found in the extant literature. Despite opposing goals, the letter writers’ shared master frame enabled them to ‘speak to’ the other side, rather than ‘past’ those with opposing views. This article explains how individuals who opposed and supported seating Berger rallied under the same master frame of Americanism. Yet, the two groups displayed strikingly different legal consciousness. These disparate groups not only conceptualized the law itself differently, but engaged the law as a tool for different agendas. At a time when violence was on the rise, these people eschewed violent means and maintained the most conventional, peaceful means of protest: letter writing. How they managed this was by embracing the law as their key, nonviolent tool.

“Framing” contentious activism: a sociological analysis of Boko Haram’s ideology, through its discourse (2008 – 2016)

ABSTRACT How does a terror movement like Boko Haram employ language and discourse towards collective action? This is the central question our paper addresses. Focusing on Boko Haram as a militant jihādist social movement organisation (SMO), our article shows how the movement’s ideology, evidenced through its discourse, “frames” narratives that identify the problem, call for action and motivate adherents and potential recruits towards violent repertoires. Using interview data, critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Social Movement Theory (SMT), specifically framing analysis, we interrogate Boko Haram’s Qur’anic exegesis based on the group’s publications, exhortations, lectures and sermons between 2008 and 2016. Along with calls for jihād (holy war, within the movement’s interpretation) and criticism of Nigeria’s federal constitution vis-à-vis Sharī‘a (Islamic law) as a superior social alternative, Boko Haram employs a specific takfir (apostate declaration) doctrine that divides the world into two camps: unbelievers (al-kāfirūn) or (kuffar) and believers. Such identity construction constitutes part of a “framing” approach to mobilisation and recruitment. In this sociological analysis of Boko Haram’s discourse, we identify diagnostic, prognostic and motivational “framing” patterns employed alongside an injustice master frame as a means to encourage collective action by the “in-group” (adherents and potential recruits) against “out-group” identities.

Progress in Programmable DNA-Aided Self-Assembly of the Master Frame of a Drug Delivery System.

Every year cancer causes approximately 10 million deaths globally. Researchers have developed numerous targeted drug delivery systems (DDSs) with nanoparticles, polymers, and liposomes, but these synthetic materials have poor degradability and low biocompatibility. Because DNA nanostructures have good degradability and high biocompatibility, extensive studies have been performed to construct DDSs with DNA nanostructures as the molecular-layer master frame (MF) assembled via programmable DNA-aided self-assembly for targeted drug release. To learn the progressing trend of self-assembly techniques and keep pace with their recent rapid advancements, it is crucial to provide an overview of their past and recent progress. In this review article, we first present the techniques to assemble the MF of a DDS with solely DNA strands; to assemble MFs with one or more additional type of construction materials, e.g., polymers (including RNA and protein), inorganic nanoparticle, or metal ions, in addition to DNA strands; and to assemble the more complex DNA nanocomplexes. It is observed that both the techniques used and the MFs constructed have become increasingly complex and that the DDS constructed has an increasing number of advanced functions. From our focused review, we anticipate that DDSs with the MF of multiple building materials and DNA nanocomplexes will attract an increasing number of researchers' interests. On the basis of knowledge about materials and functional components (e.g., targeting aptamers/peptides/antibodies and stimuli for drug release) obtained from previously performed studies, researchers can combine more materials with DNA strands to assemble more powerful MFs and incorporate more components to endow DDSs with improved or additional properties/functions, thereby subsequently contributing to cancer prevention.

Frames de uma violência: uma leitura sobre as pressões para a inclusão da pauta da violência contra as mulheres nas políticas públicas brasileiras

Abstract This article aims to identify and analyze the frames mobilized by feminist movements to address violence against women and discuss their influences on public policies. The theoretical and methodological framework comprises frames (Snow & Benford, 1992). The research material consists of articles published in the newspapers Folha de S. Paulo and O Globo during periods related to three state actions that sought to combat violence against women: i) the creation of the women’s police stations in 1985, ii) the Special Criminal Courts in 1995, and iii) the approval of Law 11.340, of 2006 (Maria da Penha Law). The results indicate that throughout the analyzed periods, a master frame, "violence against women," resonated in public opinion, and this issue was recognized as a problem by the state that established measures to confront the problem.

Analyzing frame analysis: A critical review of framing studies in social movement research

This critical review of more than three decades of studies of frames and framing in Social Movement (SM) research first offers a brief history of the notion of ‘frame’ in various disciplines, and then discusses empirical studies of frame alignment, frame disputes, frame resonance and master frames, among other notions. It is found that the very notion of discursive of cognitive frames remains very vague in these studies, and what are actually studied are for instance, beliefs, attitudes, goals, ideologies or values, especially how they are expressed in discourse. Also studies of relations between frames and culture, identity and discourse show that the notions of frames and framing are theoretically and methodologically unsatisfactory in empirical studies. It is concluded that the methods of the cultural paradigm of SM research may take advantage of the advances of more explicit methods in the study of language, discourse, interaction and cognition.

Performance evaluation of computer-aided automated master frame selection techniques for fetal echocardiography.

Fetal echocardiography is widely used for the assessment of fetal heart development and detection of congenital heart disease (CHD). Preliminary examination of the fetal heart involves the four-chamber view which indicates the presence of all the four chambers and its structural symmetry. Examination of various cardiac parameters is generally done using the clinically selected diastole frame. This largely depends on the expertise of the sonographer and is prone to intra- and interobservational errors. To overcome this, automated frame selection technique is proposed for the recognition of fetal cardiac chamber from fetal echocardiography. Three techniques have been proposed in this research study to automate the process of determining the frame referred as "Master Frame" that can be used for the measurement of the cardiac parameters. The first method uses frame similarity measures (FSM) for the determination of the master frame from the given cine loop ultrasonic sequences. FSM makes use of similarity measures such as correlation, structural similarity index (SSIM), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), and mean square error (MSE) to identify the cardiac cycle, and all the frames in one cardiac cycle are superimposed to form the master frame. The final master frame is obtained by considering the average of the master frame obtained using each similarity measure. The second method uses averaging of ± 20% from the midframes (AMF). The third method uses averaging of all the frames (AAF) of the cine loop sequence. Both diastole and master frames have been annotated by the clinical experts, and their ground truths are compared for validation. No segmentation techniques have been used to avoid the variability of the performance of various segmentation techniques. All the proposed schemes were evaluated using six fidelity metrics such as Dice coefficient, Jaccard ratio, Hausdorff distance, structural similarity index, mean absolute error, and Pratt figure of merit. The three proposed techniques were tested on the frames extracted from 95 ultrasound cine loop sequences between 19 and 32weeks of gestation. The feasibility of the techniques was determined by the computation of fidelity metrics between the master frame derived and the diastole frame chosen by the clinical experts. The FSM-based identified master frame found to closely match with manually chosen diastole frame and also ensures statistically significant. The method also detects automatically the cardiac cycle. The resultant master frame obtained through AMF though found to be identical to that of the diastole frame, the size of the chambers found to be reduced that can lead to inaccurate chamber measurement. The master frame obtained through AAF was not found to be identical to that of clinical diastole frame. It can be concluded that the frame similarity measure (FSM)-based master frame can be introduced in the clinical routine for segmentation followed by cardiac chamber measurements. Such automated master frame selection also overcomes the manual intervention of earlier reported techniques in the literature. The fidelity metrics assessment further confirms the suitability of proposed master frame for automated fetal chamber recognition.

‘Dignified Ageing’: Entrepreneurs of Long-Term Care Reform in Russia

This essay presents the discourse of ‘dignified ageing’ (dostoinoe starenie) mobilised by policy entrepreneurs in Russia in the fight for long-term care reform, which has been underway since 2017. Experts and practitioners have been voicing concerns about the quality of life and care for senior citizens in Russia and addressing barriers to and opportunities for improvement. Their master frame has been ‘dignified ageing’, which conveys multiple meanings and is aimed at mobilising the support of authorities and publics. We analyse public presentations and semi-structured interviews with reform entrepreneurs to explore their perspectives on ‘dignified ageing’ in the Russian context.

Framing Injustice: Special Anti-Robbery Squads (SARS) in Nigeria and the #EndSARS Protest Response from a Social Movement Theory Perspective

This article employs Social Movement Theory (SMT) to examine collective action mobilisation against malfeasance by Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squads (SARS). Created in the 1990s to counter armed gangs, SARS gradually became discredited. Finally, in October 2020, after weeks of public protest, the unit was disbanded. The #EndSARS movement proved instrumental here. The present article explores the origins, nature and decline of SARS until the #EndSARS protests. #EndSARS arguably provoked police reform in Nigeria. Furthermore, whereas social media has dominated the discourse on the protesters’ agency, I employ framing theory, as a SMT sub-set, to show that #EndSARS employed diagnostic, prognostic and motivational frames, within “injustice” master frames, towards collective action mobilisation. In conducting this analysis, I situate the #EndSARS case within the broader literature debate on impactful protests against police brutality.

“Communist Controlled Black Barbarism”: The Citizen’s Councils of America’s Anti-Communist Master Frame Cluster and the Renovation of White Supremacist Ideology

Using insights from a content coding analysis of discourse from the most influential White supremacist segregationist organization of the early Cold War decades, Citizen’s Councils of America (CCA or Council), I argue that social movement organizations use a master frame cluster, a package of closely related, overlapping frames with a core master frame to adapt and update pre-existing, older ideology to contemporaneous sociopolitical currents and thereby mainstream, modernize, and streamline propaganda messaging. From its media outlets and White supremacist ideology, the Council deployed what I call its Anti-Communist Master Frame Cluster, proclaiming that unrestrained Black savagery and misguided White sympathy, including liberals, leftists, and socialists, all followed a downward slope toward communist tyranny or what the Council called, “Communist controlled Black barbarism.” Twenty-first century conservative rightwing media has inherited the CCA’s master frame cluster to discredit Black Lives Matter protests, still using anti-communist messaging, but with a “Black-on-Black” crime narrative as the main propaganda weapon against Black protest.

Framing in the Authoritarian Context: Policy Advocacy by Environmental Movement Organisations in China

ABSTRACT When do CSOs succeed in influencing policy when working under one-party regimes? This article compares two cases in which Environmental CSOs (ECSOs) in China tried to influence policies. This article argues that the difference between success and failure is connected to the types of frames that the organizations use and how well these frames can link to meta-cultural master frames. Most studies have concentrated on how activists apply frames to get resonance among the population to mobilize people against the regime. However, under an authoritarian regime that greatly represses public demonstrations, it is often more important to frame arguments in a manner that gets resonance among policymakers than it is to gain resonance among the population. Even though it has been rare to analyze how CSOs frame their arguments vis-à-vis policymakers, some recent studies of Chinese CSOs have done so. However, these studies do not go deep enough in elaborating the cultural and historical contexts of these framing strategies. Our study goes deeper in this direction, by claiming that in order to get resonance the frames must be in line with the cultural norms of society. Consequently, we link culture to the “master frames.” Scholars are often reluctant to discuss master frames because the term itself is a bit diffuse and it is not always apparent how to use it. By tying master frames to a meta-cultural analysis, we make it clearer how the concept of master frames can be useful for analyzing the framing strategies of political entrepreneurs.

The evil corporation master frame: The cases of vaccines and genetic modification.

Employing a qualitative content analysis of online comments made on YouTube and letters to the editor published in US newspapers, we examine the deployment and neutralization of the evil corporation master frame in debates on two distinct biotechnologies, vaccines and genetically modified organisms. This study builds on previous research by outlining three diagnostic components of the evil corporation master frame: dishonesty, greed, and the contamination of authority. It also finds that supporters of vaccines and genetically modified organisms seek to neutralize the evil corporation master frame through aggressive, defensive, endurance, and redemptive framings. This study provides ideational detail for the ways that controversial biotechnology is constructed. The particularly vexing anti-vaccine movement is not dissimilar from other challenges to mainstream science as disparate movements draw on the same master frame. It also demonstrates how defenses of genetically modified organisms and vaccines tend to reify the anti-corporate stigma that sustains challenges to scientific authority.

Mainstreaming Gender in Policy Narratives: Childcare Policies during Latin America’s Left Turn

Abstract During Latin America’s left turn, women and children benefited from the expansion of social policies. This expansion, however, was not followed by the homogeneous incorporation of a gender equality perspective in childcare policies, with different processes occurring in similar countries. What might explain these differences? To address this question, we conducted qualitative and comparative research on Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. We found greater progress in mainstreaming childcare policies when a broad discourse coalition gathered around a master frame that was simultaneously mainstreamed by feminist perspectives.

The impact of the SDGs on non-financial corporate communications: an analysis of CaixaBank reports (2013-2019).

Academic interest in corporate discourse has been increasing in recent years. This paper examines how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have influenced the structure of the discourse employed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, taking as a specific case the non-financial reports produced by CaixaBank. We employed a hybrid analytical method, using some techniques from corpus linguistics and framing analysis. In the non-financial reports from 2013 to 2017, a clear master frame was found, involving a negative evaluation of the influence of the economic crisis. In contrast, discourse concerning the SDGs forms the backbone of the 2018 and 2019 reports. Fromthe point of view of linguistic/discursive methodology, this study shows how the use of corpus linguistic techniques in combination with framing analysis can facilitate an examination of the changes in corporate discourse on sustainability, providing an effective method of studying non-financial reports.

Citizen Complaints as an Accountability Mechanism: Uncovering Patterns Using Topic Modeling

ObjectivesCitizen complaints are considered by policing researchers as an indicator of police misconduct, and a proxy of police-community relations. Nevertheless, US and EU-based studies tend to focus on sustained complaints as reported by official agencies and officer-based correlates. Using the case of Carabineros, the Chilean militarized police force, this study examines (a) latent topics contained in a large set of complaints against the police on a digital platform, and (b) the change of those topics across time and (c) by complainants’ educational level.MethodsWe use novel computational natural language processing techniques to identify latent themes across the corpus of complaints ( N = 1,623), hosted on an online forum from 2013 to 2020.ResultsOur findings show eight latent themes across the corpus. Among others, these themes were related to police effectiveness, police misbehavior, and a master frame of institutional crisis that has significantly grown over the last year. Additionally, differences in the prevalence of topics by complainants’ educational level were also found.ConclusionsOur findings contribute to the enterprise of opening the black box of complaints against the police and highlighting opportunities for social accountability in a developing country.

Populist everyday politics in the (mediatized) age of social media: The case of Instagram celebrity advocacy

This article is interested in populism outside the master frame of institutional politics (populist parties/leaders), considering, instead, the populist potential of celebrities’ everyday politics on social media. To understand this potential, the article suggests, we need to understand how celebrities are compelled by today’s mediatized communicative ecosystem to perform themselves as ordinary advocates for people-victims. We need to examine how the performative logic that this ecosystem forces into platforms accommodates certain emotional claims to ordinariness and normative-moral claims to advocacy—who is (un)worthy of a place in the victimized people that celebrities should advocate for. The article does so by analyzing two paradigmatically different case studies: Lady Gaga’s legacy-status and Greta Thunberg’s influencer-style performances of celebrity advocacy on Instagram. The analytical discussion leads to contemplating the mediatized populist politics of everyday politics that both perform, despite their differences, and its ambivalent relationship with liberal democracy (centrist moderation and neoliberal consolidation).

Resisting ‘leftist dictatorship’? Memory politics and collective action framing in populist far-right street protest

ABSTRACT This article contributes to cultural approaches to populism, focusing on the uses of memory in far-right protest politics. Conceptually, it develops a novel approach to memory politics suitable to investigate the uses of memory in grassroots mobilization by integrating scholarship on ‘the politics of memory’ and the ‘movement-memory nexus’. Also, it argues for the conceptualization of populism as a collective action frame to explain the emergence and persistence of populist street mobilization. Methodologically, the article draws from the critical case study of the Dresden-based ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident’ (PEGIDA), one of contemporary Europe’s most sustained instances of populist far-right protest. Based on the interpretive analysis of original ethnographic data generated in demonstrations in Dresden in 2019-20, it shows how PEGIDA deploys controversial reinterpretations of regional, national, and European history to sustain the populist master frame of ‘resistance against dictatorship’, articulating the antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elites’ as a long-standing struggle of democracy against leftist totalitarianism. Uncovering the many ways in which PEGIDA strategically mobilizes the past, the analysis emphasizes the constitutive relationship between culture and populist protest, and demonstrates the dovetailing of populist and far-right ideational elements in grassroots mobilization.

Defying gravity: environmental justice rises in California’s capital city

ABSTRACT Sacramento, California’s capital city has not, until recently, had the kind of cohesive and effective environmental justice (EJ) movement as seen in several other regions around the state or country. However, in the past 15 years, a variety of new forms of EJ organising are producing a vibrant if uneven movement. This article examines how and why this transformation has occurred and what challenges the movement has faced and which persist. I propose that the rise of the EJ movement in Sacramento can be traced to an explicit articulation of an EJ master frame, the development of an increasingly dense network of EJ-oriented organisations, the mobilisation of a grassroots base of residents, and several state-led EJ policy initiatives that have created openings for community mobilisation. The article begins by presenting a theoretical framework to understand the formation and development of social movements. This is followed by an overview of local environmental injustices and a series of focused case studies of key EJ struggles in the region. Finally, it closes with a discussion of the dynamic rise of the Sacramento EJ movement and further questions to track its continued development.