Browsing by Subject "framing"
Now showing items 1-6 of 6
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(2021)This study aims to analyze the abortion debate in the United States by examining the Senate’s debate over ‘The Women’s Health Protection Act 2022’. The ‘Women’s Health Protection Act. 2022’ pursued to codify Roe v. Wade in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft planning to overrule the constitutional right to abortion. This study analyzes the values the Senators use in their arguments for and against abortion, and thus proceeds to identify the worldviews behind their abortion stances. The debate around the ‘Women’s Health Protection Act’ occurred in May 2022 and the focus is on the Republican and Democrat Senators’ rhetoric. This study answers two research question about the values and worldviews represented in the Senators’ speeches during the debate’s first day. New rhetoric, a theory on argumentation and a tool for its analysis serves as the study’s method in identifying the values used by the Senators. The study’s theoretical framework combines Lakoff’s framing theory with theories of political polarization. The theoretical framework allows for critical assessment of the values the analysis identifies. Lakoff’s framing theory pursues understanding of contemporary American politics through the concepts that constitute people’s thoughts and shape their worldviews. Political polarization aims to explain growing fundamentalist political positions and the lack of effective negotiations and compromise in the 21st century. The ‘Women’s Health Protection Act 2022’ debate is the object of the analysis and 35 speeches from the two-day debate’s first day serve as this study’s data. The speeches vary in length from approximately 210 words to 2500 words. The speeches were analyzed according to Perelman and Olbrecths-Tyteca’s new rhetoric by coding the values with ATLAS.ti. The analysis identified 34 different values and the most used values per party were defined as the party’s core values within the debate’s context. For the Republican Senators these values were human life, the rights of healthcare practitioners, safety, legitimacy, the rights of the children and unborn, and science. The core values of the Democrat Senators were women’s rights, freedom, safety, legitimacy, and health. The study found the Senators’ most prominent values to resemble Lakoff’s theory on the Republicans and Democrats’ worldviews. The only contradiction was found in the Republican Senators demonstrating empathy towards women. The application of political polarization to the study’s findings showed signs of a polarized Senate and a polarized debate. The study was able to provide an account of what the Democrat’s rhetoric and frames in abortion debate may look like, as previous research mainly focuses on the Republicans. Furthermore, the study demonstrates the need to study the dynamic between the Senate and the electorate, as the findings suggest the Senate may enforce more extreme abortion legislation than the public wants.
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(2020)The world in which we live and communicate is complicated and complex. This is also true for political communication, which has moved, in some part, to newer forms of media, such as social media platforms. Politicians have gained the opportunity to communicate directly with their followers online, without any mediators. This allows political actors to present the image of themselves and the version of reality they want to convey. Twitter is one example of such a platform, which provides an interactive channel of communication between political actors and their audience. This thesis aims to analyse how the 280 characters long tweets are used as forms of communication by employing and combining Erving Goffman’s concepts of framing and self-presentation. Frames are interpretative frameworks which are activated by our brains to make sense of situations and events and the understanding of self-presentation describes how actors portray themselves in social settings. (Political) actors can change the way the narrative is framed, depending on which frame of reference they are highlighting in their communication. For the case sample, 1785 tweets by the German party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have been collected over a period of four weeks at the beginning of 2020. Their categorisation as a right-wing party as well as their active presence on Twitter makes them an interesting subject of study. To structure the collected data, the tweets are divided into 12 categories of framing strategies, which are based on the differentiation between a Positive Self-Presentation and a Negative Other-Presentation. The analysis of the tweets and the employed framing strategies showed that the party emphasised the (perceived) differences between themselves and the other, which ranges from political elites, oppositional political parties and their supporters to civilian groups such as activists, migrants or critics of the party. Language is important for the portrayal of the framing strategies, either through the usage of personal pronouns – for example, “us” or “them” – or through the invention of mocking names classifying the other. The self, here the AfD, is always presented positively and the others are depicted in a negative light. It has been found that the combination of different framing strategies can lead to a stronger emphasis on the positive self and the negative other. The tweets generally portray one version of reality or one version of the narrative that fits best to the objective the party wants to portray. The data sample and the period of data collection are rather limited and would need to be expanded for further analysis. Nonetheless, the results give an indication of how framing strategies can be used daily in political communication, which can add to the knowledge of political researchers and communicators.
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(2019)The unity of the Realm is the political construction comprising of Denmark, Faroe Islands and Greenland. In 2013 the Danish Parliament decided to establish an annual debate dedicated entirely to the discussion of matters concerning the Danish Realm – a unique opportunity for politicians to gather and discuss the Realm in its entirety, not just Greenlandic or Faroese matters respectively. The analysed material consists of five parliamentary debates, one from each year from 2014 to 2018 since the establishment of the annual debate. This study looks at what topics were discussed during these debates and how the Danish Realm was understood and contested in different ways. The first part of the study covers the debates and the most occurring topics that arose from the material. Using critical discourse analysis, the second part analyses how the main concepts and terminology was used, how the politicians used language in different ways and how different aspects of the Danish Realm were framed. The findings show that similar topics occurred throughout the debates, and that there was no significant difference in what the parties deemed as important topics. The Danish Realm was discussed and framed in very different ways and it was evident that the concept of the Realm means very different things to all of its three members. These varying ideas of what the Realm is, and should be, were contested in the discussions. The proportionately large focus on the independence question and the Arctic, as well as the findings from the discourse analysis demonstrate that Denmark wishes to maintain the Realm as it is to be able to continue its role as an arctic actor, to which especially Greenlandic independence could possibly be a hindrance. The Faroese and Greenlandic politicians displayed discontent with the way the Realm is constructed today and pointed out the need for structural changes.
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(2019)This thesis investigates how four newspapers in Finland, two Finnish-language newspapers and two Swedish-language newspapers, describe the effects asylum seekers have on Finnish society. The newspapers included in the study are Helsingin Sanomat, Hufvudstadsbladet, Keskisuomlainen and Vasabladet. In addition to studying how the news media frame the consequences of taking in asylum seekers, I also compare if there are any differences between how the Swedish-language newspapers and the Finnish-language newspapers report on these issues. The reviewed time period is the year of 2017. This is an interesting period because the number of asylum seekers arriving to Finland had stabilized, after the dramatic increase in 2015. At this time, the news media put much focus on the consequences that followed, such as demonstrations both against and for asylum seeker rights as well as the discussions about what to do with the people who were not permitted to stay in the country. Illuminating how the news media describe the effects asylum seekers have on society is relevant because there are voices accusing the news media of being uncritical when it comes to asylum seekers and ignoring the negative effects this kind of immigration might create. The debate about asylum seekers is very polarised and the arguments are often based on feelings and prejudice. To enable a constructive discussion about this subject, we need knowledge about what the news coverage really looks like. This information is important to the public debate as well as to the journalists reporting on these issues. To find out how the news media picture the effects asylum seekers have on society, I have studied to what extent the four newspapers use nine different frames. Five of these frames describe asylum seekers as a problem for society, while four frames describe them as a resource. The result shows that news media in Finland describe the effects of asylum seekers as something negative to a much higher extent than as something positive. The most frequently used frames describe asylum seekers as if they contribute to crime and weaken social cohesion. Swedish-language newspapers do not rapport about negative effects of asylum seekers as often as Finnish-language newspapers. However, neither do they write about positive effects as often as the Finnish-language newspapers do.
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(2020)This thesis sets out to investigate what frames are used in the U.S. media to discuss responsibility for climate change. Particularly, the study seeks to identify what frames are used to discuss action for climate change mitigation. The normative framework for analyzing responsibility is established by the social connection model by Iris Marion Young, which presents a forward-looking approach for addressing responsibility for issues of structural injustice. The theoretical framework of this thesis derives from existing literature on climate change, the media, and media framing. The study was conducted using a qualitative method of frame analysis. Data for the study was collected from the digital contents of three popular news media outlets in the United States: CNN, Fox News Channel, and The New York Times. The data consists of news articles that were published online in December 2019. The results of the study indicate that responsibility for climate change mitigation is rarely approached directly in the media. Rather, it is implied through discussions about what actions should be taken. The study identifies four main frames of responsibility. The first frame emphasizes the conflict between the younger and older generations and deems that collective efforts are required to address the situation. The second frame accentuates the political division over the issue of climate change by casting blame upon Asian nations while downplaying the respective responsibility of the United States. Similarly, the efforts of the Democratic party are ridiculed. The third frame emphasizes consumer action through practical efforts but does not promote buying less as a possible solution. Lastly, the study identifies a frame, in which corporate responsibility is approached in two ways: to hold highly polluting industries accountable and to promote green business as a solution. The study finds that the framing employed by Fox News Channel emphasizes the economic disadvantages of climate change mitigation and sees it as an issue of causal responsibility for Asian nations. On the other hand, the findings of the study suggest that the media coverage of the youth protests against climate change often yield notions of collective responsibility and frame the issue of responsibility in a more contextualized setting. The findings of the study support existing research of how media frames the issue of climate change and how polarization affects the framing. Through the application of the social connection model, the findings of this study contribute to the literature of news framing of climate change by demonstrating how the issue of responsibility is framed.
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(2017)Women’s movements in Bolivia have long been divided into different feminist groups and organizations on the one hand, and indigenous women’s movements on the other. Indigenous women have generally considered feminism to be an urban, middle-class ideology that is not compatible with their conception of gender and does not represent them. They have preferred to be active within the indigenous movement, which stresses the idea of decolonization as key to achieving gender equality. Even with these differences, attempts have been made by different women’s movements to work together in order to have a stronger voice around gender-specific issues in the national debate. In this thesis, frame analysis is employed to examine such efforts of cooperation. The data is a report published in connection with a conference that brought together representatives from several different women’s organizations, with the goal of advancing dialogue between them. The frames that these activists use are examined in order to analyse how those frames address differences between women and what kind of frames are most successful in using differences as strength. The frames that emerge from the data are grouped into three broad categories. First, there are universalistic frames that see a common identity of women and a shared experience of oppression as a starting point for solidarity. Second, there are local frames that ground themselves in the specific struggles to find common ground between different women’s movements in the Bolivian context. These frames base the idea of solidarity on common goals and agendas. Third, there are frames that take a personal approach and present personal accounts of struggles and processes of change. These frames are able to incorporate multiple identities into a personal narrative and to treat solidarity and coming together as an ongoing and open-ended process. The frames in this data that are best able to celebrate differences as strength are certain local and personal frames that move away from broad, conceptual definitions of patriarchy and feminism and towards lived experiences and shared struggles. They focus on the process of coming together and building alliances, which opens them up to differences and to dialogue. However, a more profound analysis of power and privilege is still lacking in all these frames.
Now showing items 1-6 of 6