Framing Analysis from a Rhetorical Perspective

Abstract

I was recently talking with one of my graduate students about framing analysis. When I mentioned rhetorical framing analysis, the student expressed surprise: she was unaware of such studies. I was not surprised by her response, but it did spark the desire to fi nd out in more detail what was out there in our communication and political science journals. Armed with our library’s Communication & Mass Communication Complete database in EBSCOhost, I did some informal investigating. I went away with the impression that since the mid-1990s the majority of framing research has derived from a social scientifi c orientation, with an especially noticeable surge of such work since 2003 (see also, Bryant & Miron, 2004). I see, however, something new brewing in conferences I’ve attended over the past few years. I have noticed an upswing in framing work derived from a quite different orientation. Increasingly I see qualitative, most notably rhetorical, framing work at conferences and, more slowly still, in print (e.g., Edwards, 2009; Kuypers & Cooper, 2005; Kuypers, Cooper, & Althouse, 2008; Ott & Aoki, 2002; Valenzano, 2009). If my observations have some degree of viability, and there is a domination of the social scientifi c orientation in framing research, how should those unfamiliar with more qualitative, and in particular, with rhetorical uses of framing research make sense of this rise in the popularity of framing in homes outside of the social sciences?1 Additionally, I noted that one sees rhetoricians use framing studies generated from within the social sciences, but one fi nds a dearth of rhetorical studies cited in social scientifi c work. My own experiences (personal and second hand) of trying to get rhetorically based framing research published in journals dominated by a social scientifi c orientation suggests that rhetorical work in framing is dismissed out of hand by social scientists, even in journals clearly stating that they are open to all research methods.

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