Un-fracturing the Paradigm. Toward a New Framing Schema to Analyze Culture in Media, Social Problems and Policy Agenda: the Immigration-Problem Case

The “struggles over meaning” are increasingly played out around framing processes, the ability to frame reality and define the situation (Castells 2009). However, the flourish- ing literature produces various definitions of framing and tools of framing analysis so varied that the paradigm of frame analysis prevalent in public discourse is still defina- ble as “fractured” (Entman 1993). Over time the numerous researches on news frames have proposed different defi- nitions and analytical patterns, in an attempt to address this fragmentation, the contribution (from empirical ma- terial collected over the years within the Italian case) tries to propose an approach to refine the description of domi- nant narratives, the analysis of frames and its “interpretive packages” (Gamson, Modigliani 1989) and its connections with the collective imaginary. The authors propose a heu- ristic tool to define structure, cultural resonances, and met- aphors, with two aims: a) to suggest a new schemata to define and identify the main narratives and its relation to the different framing levels (key metaphor, general frames, policy and news frames ordered by level of generality); b) a taxonomy to describe the relationship between existing narratives, those that have been constructed over time to counteract them (counterframing), those that propose to reframe them (reframing), and those that propose to be new or different (alternative narratives). The theoretical attempt here is to bring order and construct a set of defi- nitions of actions to counter the dominant frames, useful also for activists and minority voices. he more than 30-year history of the media coverage of migrations offers a vast array of research and case studies of great and enduring effectiveness to be used as examples of the scheme’s use.