COUNTERING OR REFRAMING MIGRATIONS Frames, Definitions, Strategies to Imagine New Metaphors and Narrative for the Media Agenda

For decades now, the framing of migrations in public discourse and news media appears to be stuck within a limited number of recurring stories. Therefore, the need emerges to find new perspectives in policies and a narrative more useful to understand the social change produced by migratory processes and offer new interpretations. The effectiveness of these alternatives is closely related to the ability to analyse the structure of the dominant frames and the metaphorical connections of the hegemonic narratives. Additionally, the contribution aims at offering a methodology to analyse the media discourse, a specific set of definitions and some tools useful for analysing the impact of arts, campaigns and media activist action and, at least, to design new and more effective ones. For this objective, the article addresses three needs: a) refining the description of the dominant narratives, by proposing a heuristic scheme to define key metaphors, and general as well as specific issue frames; b) completing this structure with the possible strategies for minority voices, by defining the relationship between the dominant narratives and those that, over time, have been constructed to counter them (counter-narratives), as well as those that are built to provide new sense and narrative-reframing; c) evaluating these possibilities by placing in this scheme some examples of counter-frames to verify their argumentative effect and possible effectiveness. In this third part the article analyses some artistic interventions or civil society campaigns developed in the Italian or international context to investigate their position in this scheme and to answer the following research questions: are these proposals built only as simple counter-frames, that is, do they only react, reformulating only one of the aspects of the narrative present in the agenda? Or are they reframing strategies, that is, they offer a different discourse with respect to fundamental frames, key metaphors and basic analogies or dualities. In other words, starting from the analysis of the framing structure the goal is to investigate and measure the agency capabilities.