Oppositional Frame Research Articles

“Mista, Are You in a Good Mood?”: Stylization to Negotiate Interaction in an Urban Hawai’i Classroom

AbstractThe transgressive use of language by out-group speakers, or crossing is used in a variety of ways to achieve both affiliative and disaffiliative ends among youths. However, crossing can also be used as an affiliative resource in asymmetrical power relations between teachers and students. Reporting on the findings of a 1.5 year ethnography of an English/language arts classroom at a multilingual and multiethnic public middle school in Hawai’i, this paper explores one teacher’s use of stylization practices which take the form of crossing. The teacher stylizes students’ voices through ventriloquizing, which is an affiliative resource when strategically embedded in ritual oppositional frames of interaction. However, when embedded in other interactional frames, this transgressive use of language results in acts of insult or mocking. I analyze audio recordings of naturally occurring interaction to explore how Hawai’i Creole (or Pidgin) is used transgressively in reported speech by the teacher, an “out-group” individual, for negotiating interactions in his English language arts classroom. Instances of transgressive language emerge as artfully performed strategies that provide a rich site for the construction of affiliative identities. The use of crossing allows the teacher to take liminal stances between offense and respect to strategically manage student participation in this diverse classroom. These findings point to the important role that crossing plays in acts of identity through reported speech where the performance of crossing within positively valued, jocular oppositional classroom rituals demonstrates the capacity for crossing as a contributing factor to the emergence of a shared sense of community in the classroom.

Facilitating repertoires of coordination, opposition distinction, and comparison in young children with autism.

According to Relational Frame Theory (rft), repertoires of derived relational responding are essential for the development of human verbal behavior. As a result, the implications of relational framing for the education of developmentally disabled populations may be immense. Although at the level of process, there appears to be little difference among specific relational frames, there is potentially a natural sequence to their emergence in typical development. However, there is very little published evidence of training children across multiple frames consecutively. The current research comprised four studies that explored an extended sequence of training and testing in the relational frames of coordination, opposition, distinction, and comparison in a sample of nine young children with autism. The results demonstrate the relative ease with which relational deficits in these areas were remediated. In addition, the relationship between outcomes on the Verbal Behavior Milestones and Placement Program-Assessment (vb-mapp) and individual relational training requirements was investigated.

Food security and food sovereignty

The terms food security and food sovereignty originally emerged as separate terms to describe different things. The former is a concept that describes a condition regarding access to adequate food, while the latter is more explicitly a political agenda for how to address inadequate access to food and land rights. Over the past decade, the critical food studies literature has increasingly referred to these terms as being oppositional to each rather than relational to one another. This commentary reflects on the emergence and rationale behind this binary and argues that the current oppositional frame within the literature is problematic in several ways. First, critics of food security have inserted a rival normative agenda into what was originally a much more open-ended concept. Second, the grounds on which that normative agenda is assigned to food security are shaky on several points. Given these problems, the commentary argues that the juxtaposition of food security and food sovereignty as competing terms is in many ways more confusing than helpful to policy dialogue on questions of hunger and the global food system.

An electoral discourse approach to state decentralisation: State-wide parties’ manifesto proposals on Scottish and Welsh devolution, 1945–2010

This article examines the electoral discourse associated with state decentralisation. It offers an original perspective that complements existing studies by detailing the discourse-based dimension of policy agenda-setting associated with Scottish and Welsh devolution in UK state-wide parties’ general election manifestos 1945–2010. Innovative aspects include a combined quantitative (issue-salience) and qualitative (policy framing) methodological technique transferable to other (quasi-)federal jurisdictions. The present UK findings reveal policy on devolution to be part of a fluid and contested discursive process. Concerned to maintain the union-state, the principal parties present a ‘punctuated narrative’ as they shift policy positions on the exact nature of devolution for the two nations; only the Liberals/Liberal Democrats maintain a broadly consistent stance. With a trend of increasing salience that extends over seven decades, ‘identity’ and ‘autonomy’ are revealed as the most salient pro-devolution tropes. The ‘demise of the union-state’ and ‘promoting nationalism’ are foremost among oppositional frames. Following constitutional reform in 1999, analysis shows that the future trajectory (and end point) of devolution continues to be a vexed and salient electoral issue.

Discursive Obstruction and Elite Opposition to Environmental Activism in the Czech Republic

Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists' discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech Republic. Our research examines how democratic states deploy oppositional frames and enlist elite countermovement support for their efforts to obstruct challenges. Using a range of data sources, we delineate the mechanisms used by these elite actors to vilify and stigmatize environmental activists, paving the way for more violent forms of public harassment. The concept we initiate, discursive obstruction, adds the critical dimension of power relations to analyses of both framing processes and discursive opportunity structures. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for social movement research.

Poverty Vs Parenting: an emergent dichotomy

Popular and political discussions in the UK about children’s future prospects are currently dominated by an emergent dichotomy in which either ‘poverty’ or ‘parenting’ is posited as the explanatory factor. In the current period of austerity this oppositional framing has become increasingly explicit: in response to the riots which took place across England in August 2011 one set of commentators focused on a lack of personal responsibility with its origins in the absences of appropriate parental role models, while others emphasised poverty and social disadvantage as causal mechanisms. The same pattern of highlighting either poverty or parenting is evident in major policy documents, including two significant government commissioned reports The Foundation Years (2010) and Early Intervention (2011).This paper argues that the development of the poverty/parenting dichotomy should be resisted because it is both unconvincing and unhelpful. Notwithstanding its popular and political prevalence, this discourse is unconvincing because research evidence suggests the importance of both parental engagement and financial resources for outcomes for children. Further, it is unhelpful because the creation and maintenance of this dichotomy works against developing a nuanced understanding of how the practices and attitudes of parents interact with economic circumstances and access to resources. Therefore the paper argues that as social researchers we must actively challenge lazy misrepresentations of existing evidence and counter any simplistic discourse. This needs to be done in combination with conducting work which can develop better understandings of the relationships between material disadvantage and what parents do, as well as effectively communicating these findings.

Training and Deriving Precalculus Relations: A Small-Group, Web-Interactive Approach

A small-group, web-interactive approach to teaching precalculus concepts was investigated. Following an online pretest, 3 participants were given a brief (15 min) presentation on the details of reciprocal math relations and how they operate on the coordinate axes. During baseline, participants were tested regarding their ability to construct formulas for a diversified series of graphs. This was followed by online, construction-based, small-group training procedures focusing on the construction of mathematical functions and a test of novel relations. Participants then received group training in accordance with frames of coordination (same as) and frames of opposition (reciprocal of) formula- to-graph relations. Online assessment indicated that participants showed substantial improvement over baseline and pretest performances. This was true even though, during the tests of novel relations, graphs were displayed with scattered data points instead of solid lines on the coordinate axes. Although one participant was unable to complete the second half of the experiment, we were able to train this small group employing approximately the same number of exposures needed for individual training in previous research.

Clear from and clear of: The asymmetric syntax of detaching

Verbs of detaching (clear, wipe, squeeze, etc.) may occur in two frames in Hebrew. In the Change of Location (COL) frame, the stuff is a direct object and the location is a locative source PP. In the Change of State (COS) frame, the location is a direct object and the stuff is an oblique PP. We demonstrate that this PP is headed by a null preposition, which is responsible for a cluster of peculiar syntactic effects. COL and COS in the two frames instantiate scalar changes. Alternating verbs do not lexicalize any scalar change; nonalternating verbs lexicalize either COL (e.g., remove) or COS (e.g., relieve), failing to occur in the opposite frame due to a constraint against the encoding of multiple scalar changes per event. The advantages of this analysis are critically compared against previous accounts.

Parties, Partisanship, and Democratic Politics

On the Side of the Angels makes two core arguments, first for the of politics, and second for the moral distinctiveness of partisanship (p. 7). By creativity, Rosenblum means that political parties are entrepreneurial and agonistic institutions that are essential to representative democracy because they create, not just reflect, political interests and opinions (p. 7). She derives from this notion a sharp rebuke to theorists of deliberative democracy who simply take it for granted that political parties have no role to play in reasoned exchange precisely because they are partisan. Rosenblum asserts, to the contrary, that parties do for democratic deliberation the work that philosophy cannot: They hone conflict so that it is politically pertinent and cast it in an oppositional frame to focus citizen choice (p. 307). She praises partisans, in turn, for lending urgency to public debate. They generate conflicting positions and advance opposing arguments within a framework designed for adversarial show (p. 307). Although their explicit partiality is likely aversive to some, it nonetheless lends interest and urgency that deliberation can have only when it is about choosing sides (p. 310). Rosenblum arrives at her first core argument, the party creativity thesis, in surprising ways. She finds initial inspiration for it in one of two glorious traditions of antipartyism, and then proceeds to elaborate it by an unusual but compelling synthesis of the ideas of J. S. Mill and E. E. Schattschneider (p. 25).

Constructing and deriving reciprocal trigonometric relations: a functional analytic approach.

Participants were pretrained and tested on mutually entailed trigonometric relations and combinatorially entailed relations as they pertained to positive and negative forms of sine, cosine, secant, and cosecant. Experiment 1 focused on training and testing transformations of these mathematical functions in terms of amplitude and frequency followed by tests of novel relations. Experiment 2 addressed training in accordance with frames of coordination (same as) and frames of opposition (reciprocal of) followed by more tests of novel relations. All assessments of derived and novel formula-to-graph relations, including reciprocal functions with diversified amplitude and frequency transformations, indicated that all 4 participants demonstrated substantial improvement in their ability to identify increasingly complex trigonometric formula-to-graph relations pertaining to same as and reciprocal of to establish mathematically complex repertoires.

Ambivalent urban, immigrant identities: the incompleteness of Lao American student identities

In this article, the author elucidates the identity work of Lao American urban, immigrant students, highlighting ambivalent identities that do not fit into notions of bicultural or binary identities. It examines the various discourses and practices that inform and shape the experiences and identities of urban, Lao American high school students. It explores the ways that immigrant youth identities are continuously shaped by dominant discourses while at the same time are responses that modify, resist or echo these discourses. It shows that youth are creating incomplete, contradictory – ambivalent – urban, immigrant identities and are changing what it means to be ‘urban’ and ‘immigrant’ youth. By highlighting the ambivalent nature of immigrant identities, this article complicates binary notions of urban, immigrant identities as good/bad and unsettles the ancestral country/United States oppositional framing of the experiences of immigrant students.

Examining prejudice towards Middle Eastern persons via a transformation of stimulus functions.

Since September 11th, 2001, the field of psychology has become increasingly interested in the effects has had on America. For example, there has been a substantial increase in acts of violence (Bar-Tal & Labin, 2001) and prejudicial ideation (Coryn, Beale, & Myers, 2004) toward Muslims and people of Middle Eastern descent. Mainstream psychological accounts for acts of prejudice have included personality orientation (Crowson, DeBacker, & Thoma, 2005), and beliefs of perceived threats to the U.S., social dominance orientation, and self-categorization (Oswald, 2006). While these accounts attempt to isolate predictive factors for prejudicial ideation, they do not focus on observable behavior that is amenable to change. In fact, Sidman has said the experimental, theoretical, and applied sciences of Behavior Analysis are untapped resources with respect to the issue of (2003). He goes on to assert that terrorism is a behavioral problem, for which the solution requires a basic understanding of its maintaining variables. In a traditional behavioral account of terrorism, acts of terror and prejudice related to them would be solely governed by the consequences that follow these classes of behavior. For example, a Middle Eastern man who commits an act of would be reinforced by social contingencies (praise from fellow terrorists), the sight of a perceived enemy's suffering (images of pain following successful terrorist acts), and possibly by the media 's coverage of the act (instant fame and notoriety). In the same way, an American police officer who calls a person of Middle Eastern descent in for questioning based on his racial profile is also reinforced by social contingencies (praise from a like-minded social circle), the sight of a Middle Eastern detainee in custody, and perhaps a promotion (more money for working hard to keep his neighborhood safe from terrorism). Establishing operations (Michael, 1993) or setting events (Kantor & Smith, 1975) such as being deprived of attention for most of one's life or experiencing economic hardship would only serve to make the above consequences more salient. While a traditional behavioral account explains how direct contingencies can shape prejudicial behavior and acts of terrorism, a more comprehensive account is needed. The traditional account does not address the fact that the targets of prejudice related to terrorism, innocent U.S. and Middle Eastern civilians, have never been directly paired with either the U.S. government or terrorist groups responsible for the 9/11 attacks, respectively. Some behavior analytic researchers have answered the call. In a paper published in 2003, Dixon, Dymond, Rehfeldt, Roche, & Zlomke outlined a more complex account of prejudice and and set an agenda for empirical studies to follow. Specifically, the article explains how the 9/11 attacks themselves, the resulting emotional responses of rage and hate felt by Americans, and the images of terrorists displayed by the media come to form a frame of coordination (they become equivalent). Through multiple exemplars of these relational frames, as well as frames of opposition and difference, this class is strengthened, resulting in the generalized prejudice Americans have come to experience. The article also offers an analysis of how young Middle Eastern men come to resent the United States and consequently enter a life of terrorism. The above account stems from a Relational Frame Theory (RFT) conceptualization of prejudice and (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). RFT suggests that verbally competent humans have the ability to categorize, evaluate, and compare arbitrarily related events, but they learn to justify these relations based on verbally abstracted non-arbitrary features of related events. For example, if two objects are randomly selected (e.g. a ball and a tree) and compared to one another (e.g. How is a ball like a tree? …

Agriculture, communities, and new social movements: East European ruralities in the process of restructuring

This paper examines the usefulness of the new social movements (NSMs) paradigm in the changing context of East European post-communist societies and their agricultural systems and rural communities. Starting with statements formulated in Western sociology in the context of Western democratic societies about NSMs as a protest against modernity, the paper analyses the role of such movements in the still modernizing Eastern European reality. The first part of the paper briefly examines some basic elements of the NSMs paradigm in European and American social science. The goal of this section is not only to identify the basic characteristics of NSMs, but also to identify the typical frames used by them. The second part of the paper focuses on the presence of NSMs in the communist era. Drawing on the idea of NSMs as indicators of a ‘post-materialist shift’ as well as of ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘pro-participatory democracy’, the paper examines the frames of democratic opposition in Eastern Europe before 1989. The final part of the paper considers several selected examples from Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic to explore the role of NSMs in the process of shaping new ruralities during the post-communist transformation.

Non-kinking oil-filled acoustic sensor stave

A hydrophone stave comprises a tubular member, a braided cord (or similar flexible structure), cylindrical hydrophones, pins, two plugs and two couplings. The hose (made of a thermoplastic material) is corrugated or convoluted, and is cuffed at both ends to permit a plug to engage at each end. Each coupling includes a wire rope (or similar flexible structure). Each hydrophone has a longitudinal through-aperture (through which the braided cord passes) and a perpendicularly transverse through-aperture (through which a pin passes while also passing through a void created between strands of the braided cord). The stave is suitable for incorporation into a hydrophone array assembly providing for a selected arrayal of hydrophones, e.g., an assembly including two opposite frames united therebetween by numerous congruous parallel staves, each stave including equally spaced hydrophones, each coupling linking a plug with a frame so that the staves are selectively arranged.

Exploring the outcomes of rock and popular music instruction in high school guitar class: a case study

The purpose of this study was to better understand the impact of rock and popular teenage music on public school music education programs. ‘Frankstown Secondary School’ is a large suburban public school offering a guitar program that includes a strong popular music component. Subjects in this study were selected from students enrolled in Frankstown's guitar program. They participated in two rounds of in-depth interviews, which were recorded, transcribed and analyzed. The guitar program at Frankstown emerged as a powerful educational tool. Students who deliberately ‘chose the margin’ or adopted ‘oppositional frames’ found a program that explicitly embraced the margin. Guitar class was a place where the students seemed comfortable; a place where they were able to ‘act out’ their oppositional persona within the larger Frankstown culture – a place that accepted them as they were and was a product of their own negotiations with the instructor and one another.

BRIDGING THE GAP: SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PSYCHOANALYTIC AND SYSTEMIC THERAPEUTIC ORIENTATIONS

ABSTRACT In recent times much has been made of integrative tendencies and common ground between therapeutic orientations, previously locked into highly oppositional frames. This is evident in the rapprochement between psychoanalysis and cognitive-behavioural therapy in adult mental health. It is a trend that is also evident in the shifting relationship between systemic and psychoanalytic orientations. This paper begins with an overview of factors influencing the wider integrative ethos before considering the specific circumstance of the relationship between systemic family therapy and psychoanalysis. The paper considers both the past history of oppositionality between the two orientations as well as some current developments that might facilitate a more creative dialogue. Particular attention is paid to issues of similarity and difference between the therapeutic relationship in systemic family therapy and the psychoanalytic framework of the transference/countertransference. Implications for therapeutic technique are explored. The aim is not to minimize difference but to encourage cross-fertilization between these therapeutic orientations in the interest of patients/families who may benefit from an integrated response.

Only connect: Troubling oppositions in gender and mathematics

This paper focuses on the ways in which many researchers working in the area of gender and mathematics make sense of their data. In particular, it is argued that their use of the oppositional framing, separation versus connection (and others, such as cognition versus affect and objective versus subjective), operates to fix difference, and so to fix gender and mathematics within a structure of binary thinking that ultimately serves to re/produce gender inequalities. The aim is to suggest a more productive approach to understanding the continued gendering of participation in mathematics. This approach is based in deconstructing these oppositional patterns. This theoretical approach is illustrated using readings of interviews with two young mathematics students, Analia and Phil, talking about their relationships with the subject. The paper ends by looking at what this unfixing of difference means for mathematics pedagogy.

Student Writing as 'Academic Literacies': Drawing on Bakhtin to Move from Critique to Design

A body of research has recently emerged in the UK which adopts an 'academic literacies' stance towards student writing. An 'academic literacies' stance conceptualises student writing as a socially situated discourse practice which is ideologically inscribed (Jones et al., 1999; Lea & Street, 1998). Whilst powerful as an oppositional frame, that is as a critique of current conceptualisations and practices surrounding student writing, academic literacies has yet to be developed as a design frame (Kress, 1998, 2000) which can actively contribute to student writing pedagogy as both theory and practice. My aim in this paper is to work towards opening up a design space built on academic literacies critique. To do so, I draw on Bakhtin's work on dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981, 1984) and my research with a group of 'non-traditional' student-writers and their specific experiences of academic writing within a number of academic disciplines (Lillis, 2001). I map out the different levels of dialogism in Bakhtin's work and illustrate the way these are, and are not, enacted currently in student writing pedagogy. I conclude by calling for dialogue, rather than monologue or dialectic, to be at the centre of an academic literacies stance and briefly outline some design implications of a dialogic approach to student writing pedagogy.

If It Bleeds, It Leads

If It Bleeds, It Leads

Early Childhood Corner: Laying the Foundation for Computational Fluency in Early Childhood

Educators tend to think of computational fluency and number sense as two different types of mathematical knowledge. Computational fluency seems to entail a well-practiced and efficient use of procedures to compute how many items are in a set or how many there will be if sets are joined or separated. Number sense seems related to a deep understanding of the meaning of numbers. Through the phrasing of its major curriculum recommendations, NCTM may have unintentionally reinforced the tendency to think of these two types of knowledge as distinct or as opposed in some fundamental way. An oppositional frame of mind about these forms of knowledge is prompted by the suggestion that mathematics teaching should move away from an emphasis on facts and procedures and toward a focus on number sense (NCTM 1989), as well as a more recent recommendation that number sense should remain the dominant focus in mathematics teaching but computational fluency should not be neglected (NCTM 2000). One begins to wonder whether the two types of knowledge are acquired in different contexts and whether they require different methods of teaching. Nothing could be further from the truth.