Framing and social movements

In 2018 I wrote an article on identity formation within the refugees welcome movement. Back then research were grippling with the task of understanding what this movement was all about, since they used volunteering as a form of protest. My article noticed the same kind of tendency that had previously been noticed in Austria, where the refugee welcome movement were seen as occupying the nexus between social protest movement and conventional NGO. This is something that eventually was brought up in the larger debate were social movement scholars Donatella della Porta and Elias Steinhilpir labelled the refugee movement as a hybrid movement, which both contained elements of volunteering and social protest. 

Refugees welcome protest.
Picture from Wikimedia Commons. 


In the article I departed from a well known theoretical framework within social movement studies called framing theory. This theory states that social movements, much like the conventional media, creates schematas of intepretention, were they identify social conditions that need to change as well as casting blame on someone who is seen as responsible. This notion is based around a concept of movement identity formation, which I previously criticized in an earlier post on this blog. And perhaps this is a time for reflection upon why framing theory both worked and did not work for my analysis. 

By utilizing the theory I could identify the reasons as to why people mobilized and stayed within the movement. Even though the motivation probably was changing between individuals and time, a common concept were the media coverage of people dying in the mediterrianan sea. This was one of the key aspects as to why people mobilized. However, over time the activist went through a process of politicization, were they gained an understanding of the European refugee regime as a threat towards human rights. Thereby two frames were identified: namely a mobilizing frame consisting of a sense of the depraved other and a cast of the EU as villains. All this makes since to people in contemporary society, but what will happened in the coming forty years when the memory of the crisis fades? 

My main criticism towards framing lies in it being able to map out important historical processes, but they do not take into account of why these processes occured. A thorough understanding of these frames do need a contextualization such as the pictures of a deceased syrian three-year old who died whilst trying make it across the mediterrianan with his family, as well as the large amount of restrictivness that were later done by government parties across the EU. In writing contemporary history, such aspects might be part of the researcher own understanding but many times the research have not yet mapped out these aspects. Therefore I think that Tilly et als notion of dynamics of contention works better, since frames are only a part of a the picture. 

However, it would be foolish to abandon framing all together since it to a large degree plays a vital role in movement mobilization. In one research project that still is yet to be funded I will depart from framing theory, but utilize the concept of contextualisation. This requires a lot from the contemporary historian, but will still be necessary in order to understand why people mobilize and stay mobilized. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The use of history and why historians should mind the gap

Image
 Around two decades ago we can to some extent see how a paradigm hit Swedish history science in full force. This paradigm consisted of studies on how history was used in society and often came with a theoretical luggage from the German and English tradition. After having supervised student theseses on this area I still remain somewhat doubtful as too how students, and historians, often uses these theories. Perhaps this is also due to my PhD-thesis containing a similar approach when it comes to putting the past into neat little boxes. My criticism towards this paradigm is that it have come to be utilised as a way to only package uses of history, rather than what these packages contains. Let us for instance take the form of studying uses of history as narratives or if one so wishes, tropes. The idea here is to study how certain forms are expressed as stories of trauma, grief or “from darkness to light”. What this actually is about in the more theoretical work is to study how history ...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: Efforts to Silence Sexuality in Politics

Image
Following up on last week’s post, we can ask ourselves where questions of sexuality are being challenged in politics. From a contemporary perspective, I would argue that we are currently witnessing global attempts—particularly from conservative actors—to banish issues of sexuality from public discourse. In Foucauldian theory, we can speak of several forms of the exercise of power. Foucault uses the concept of biopower to analyze social views on sex, capitalism, and power. One of the central aspects of biopower is that it often operates through the individual, who is expected to internalize social norms rather than be externally forced to accept them. Yet, in the case of sexuality, we have over the past decades witnessed rather forceful attempts to silence it, thereby making people unaware of important aspects of their own sexuality. In such cases, the effort seems to lie in banishing "unwanted" expressions from public discourse, thereby limiting the individual’s scope for a...
Read more

Contemporary Sexual Politics: a Background

Image
This is the first part in a series of three posts in which I aim to discuss contemporary sexual politics from a more theoretical and research-based perspective than in my other posts. It forms part of a broader discussion on how sexuality can—and perhaps should—be understood as constituted by a multitude of actors. Therefore, we might not be able to speak of a single contemporary politics of sexuality, but rather of a range of political positions. During the 20th century, numerous philosophers and researchers attempted to write “the history of sexuality,” but the one who has influenced me the most is the French philosopher Michel Foucault. I have actually read all three of his original works on sexuality, but I believe the first book covers the essential foundations for discussing and understanding sexuality. Broadly, this can be said to consist of two levels of particular interest to this series of posts: a) the repressive hypothesis b) the discussion on power/knowledge and the multi...
Read more