Frames

Framed Slowness and the Ecological Value of Multiperspectivity

_Abstract

Drawing on econarratological insights, this _Article examines the ecological potential of multiperspective narratives by proposing the concept of ‘framed slowness,’ that is, a slow way of experiencing narrative elicited by the use of framing devices. By examining how framing strategies—such as segmentivity, paratextual framing, coordination of perspectives, and rereading—can decelerate the reading experience, this _Article challenges the typical association of multiperspective narratives with fast-paced, plot-driven storytelling. Such framing strategies can disrupt teleology and narrative progression, thus directing readers’ attention to the multilayered entanglement of character perspectives. I suggest that ‘character-driven’ examples of multiperspectivity are more conducive to slowness, since the juxtaposition of perspectives is not motivated solely by the dynamics of the plot. In the final section, I turn to Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions as an experimental multiperspective novel employing the four framing strategies for slowness I discuss throughout the _Article. Through the adoption of a complex interplay of material and internal framing strategies, Only Revolutions offers insights into the entanglement of a human love story and planetary, more-than-human temporalities. This framing of slowness positions multiperspectivity as a crucial narrative strategy vis-à-vis ecological issues.

Interlaced Frames

Seriality, Information, and Contact Zones in Late 18th and Early 19th Century Press and Printing Industry

_Abstract

This contribution understands frames as tools of structuring information visually and aesthetically. Premodern flows of information and markets of news and intelligence were organized around multiple mechanisms in which the setting of frames and boundaries was a tool to sort and register knowledge. Building on archival material, this article connects printed issues of newspapers, discussions around advertising public sale, subscription, or censorship with the capacities of business or menu cards to enfold histories of expressing social interaction to highlight gate-keeping practices and to examine the communicative conditions of contact zones. I argue that enclosures of such kinds, put in frames and bound together by lines, edges, and borders, transferred premodern conditions of media into processes that shape the modern information society. Frames provided text with boundaries, helped packaging goods, and made news a serial commodity. Moreover, this started happening between 1770 and 1850 and had its ramifications in posting and collecting cards of all sorts in the late 19th century.

Winning Time and Losing Frames

Clashing Formats in the Post-Archive

_Abstract

Marked by warring aspect ratios, resolutions, and frame rates, HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty (2022–2023) chronicles the L.A. Lakers basketball team in the 1980s. Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht’s series proves from the outset that much more than nostalgia is at stake in their television series, interrupting the opening by dissolving it into digital and analog static. Framed by technologic white noise, the opening sequence proposes it is not the Lakers, but the underlying clashes of film formats that lie at the show’s core. Grappling with the multitrack possibilities in film, it is in fluctuating image frames that the seam between visual technologies is articulated. While the inconstancy of the frame highlights the image’s ability to masquerade as historical footage, it also pulls focus away from the narrative and towards the material level of the show. The waning significance of the frame in the digital age, as discussed by Vivian Sobchack, thus enacts the flexibility and interactivity common in screens today, while also highlighting that the very material gap between the image and its border that refuses to align with digital cinema practices.

Grotesque, Absurdity, Cuteness

On the Intertwining of Argumentative Frames, Aesthetics, and Emotions in the Polish 'War on Abortion'

_Abstract

This _Article explores the centrality of argumentative frames in shaping the abortion debate in Poland, focusing on their intersection with aesthetics and emotions. Drawing on framing theory, it examines how visual and rhetorical strategies are used to construct narratives, mobilize emotions, and influence public discourse. The analysis centers on three aesthetic framing techniques—grotesque, absurdity, and cuteness—as employed by anti-abortion and pro-abortion movements.

Grotesque frames, characterized by graphic depictions of fetal remains and dystopian imagery, amplify moral shock to evoke fear, and reinforce binary narratives of ‘good versus evil.’ In contrast, absurdity disrupts such frames through humor and incongruity, as seen in feminist parody campaigns which critique the artificiality of anti-abortion propaganda. Cuteness leverages the disarming and subversive qualities of pastel hues, glitter, and playful motifs to destigmatize abortion and promote resilience and solidarity.

By exploring their cognitive, aesthetic, and emotional dimensions, this study highlights the transformative potential of frames in reproductive politics. It reveals how movements construct powerful narratives to challenge entrenched ideologies while navigating the risks of polarization and trivialization. This analysis thereby contributes to an understanding of the dynamic interplay between visual culture, emotional resonance, and political activism in shaping cultural and political contestations.

Media Framing and Stereotype Transformation

Analyzing Polish Gender Discourse and Anti-German Sentiments (2015–2023)

_Abstract

This _Article analyzes the interplay between media framing and stereotypes in Polish online media from 2015 to 2023, focusing on anti-German and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Through framing theory, particularly David A. Snow’s mechanisms of frame bridging, amplification, extension, and transformation, the study explores how Polish media shape and manipulate stereotypes about Germans and LGBTQ+ individuals to reinforce ideological narratives. The analysis reveals that conservative media often recast traditional anti-German sentiments, portraying German support for LGBTQ+ rights as a cultural threat, aligning with conservative agendas that oppose progressive values. This framing sustains polarized attitudes, significantly influencing public perceptions, policies, and societal cohesion. The study emphasizes the role of media in using historical stereotypes within contemporary sociopolitical contexts, contributing to ongoing discourse on gender and nationality in Poland.

(Re-)framing the Homeless Experience

Exploring Homeless Lives and Identities on TikTok and YouTube

_Abstract

Despite the ongoing prevalence of homelessness throughout the world, the experience remains highly stigmatized. Presentations of homelessness in traditional media tend to render subjects faceless, nameless, static, and passive, dehumanizing them in the process. In response to this presentation, some homeless individuals are using social media to share their lives and experiences. This _Article examines the social media posts of two young homeless women. It explores their experience and presentation of homelessness in their daily videos on TikTok and YouTube. Acting as a confessional and relational diary online, posting on social media allows these women to challenge existing perceptions and narratives about homelessness by showing their authentic day-to-day experience of it. By sharing their lives online, these women offer their viewers a deeply intimate, vulnerable, and relational window into the experience of homelessness, which challenges the faceless, nameless and largely invisible experience depicted in traditional media. They achieve this by sharing their routines of self-care and care for others; by participating in public space and community; and by performing gratitude, selflessness, hard work, and humility. Sharing their experience of homelessness on social media enables these women to craft a self-presentation, framing themselves as more-than-homeless.

Reframing the Dove, the Rifle, and the Faces

Débora Arango’s Gift to Álvaro Uribe

Multiple Frames

Remarks on the Framing of Borders and Migration

_Abstract

This _Essay attempts a preliminary framing of what we can understand by the work of ‘framing’ in the context of borders and migration and its inherent tensions. These are articulated in current biopolitics which are committed to life, care and humanitarian reason (Frame 1: Life). At the same time however, current biopolitics produce death zones. Therefore, the current politics in the Mediterranean are framed by what, following Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Roberto Esposito calls thanapolitics and Achille Mbembe necropolitics (Frame 2: Death). These tense, overlapping and intertwined framings of migration and the discursive networks also refer to legal norms and norm-setting, the law and its violence, the right to life and the limits of current humanitarian law and Human Rights (Frame 3: Law).

From Imagined Communities to Cultures of Collectivization

Collective Concepts between Praxeology and Theories on Schemata and Frames

_Abstract

This _Essay contributes to the issue of On Culture by asking how concepts like frame or schema could be used to analyze collectivity. It takes on a praxeological perspective which does not presuppose collectivities as given entities but as something that emerges from what we do: doing group, family, gender, nation. Part of these practices is an implicit and incorporated understanding or knowledge (i.e., culture) what it is that we are doing, how to collectivize and what for. These collectivization cultures—a conceptual extension of Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities—can be analyzed as consisting of frames or schemata. The _Essay draws on cognitive theories to distinguish collectivization scripts (e.g., frames of assembling, having dinner together) and collectivization themes (e.g., stereotypes, models of families, enterprises, nations). These again are interrelated, as are practices and practitioners, who carry collectivization experiences from one practice to another and frame nations as extended families or work teams as friendship circles.

Geopolitical Frames, Bold Lines

Online Global Solidarity and Mapping Russia’s War against Ukraine

_Abstract

In the _Essay, the author offers a reflective analysis and tracking of the needs, obstacles, and challenges of global solidarity for Ukraine, based on his work from 2022 to 2025 on building a popular rolling community “influencer feed” on the Twitter/X platform. At its height in July 2023, the digital coverage and data counter-disinformation project had nearly 35 million impressions per month, in over a hundred countries. As a resistance effort for the defense of literacy, education, and the integrity of expertise in Ukrainian culture, language, politics and policy, the ongoing February 24th Archive connects six main groups: (1) professionally trained field experts in Ukrainian Studies; (2) interested nonspecialists in and beyond European and North American academia; (3) leading journalists worldwide in over thirty languages; (4) OSINT amateurs and mapmakers cataloging war crimes to build evidentiary cases for international criminal prosecution; (5) diplomats and policymakers; and (6) most crucially, a voting protest citizenry that crosses ideological lines, hoping to ensure and raise literacy in their regional, national, and broader communities.

“Within the Gates of the Master, Is There Any Such Thing as a Prime Minister?”

A Space without Frames in the Zhuangzi

_Abstract

Reframe

Breaking through the White Gaze, Photographic Traditions in African Countries

_Abstract

This _Perspective in the form of a photo essay introduces Reframe, a documentary photography project that sought to challenge Western stereotypes and colonial narratives surrounding Namibia. Prompted by a viral image from 2016 and the problematic media responses it generated, the _Perspective traces how dominant representations of Namibia have historically erased its people in favor of empty, romanticized landscapes. Reframe responds by empowering Namibian photographers to document everyday life from the inside, culminating in exhibitions in Windhoek and Berlin. Through this exchange, the project constructed a decolonial visual practice and promoted a more complex and self-determined view of Namibia’s social realities.

Making Queer Content Visible

Media Framing of Queerness in Serbia

_Abstract 

This _Perspective portrays the challenges and needs of the queer population in Serbian public discourse. Since the first Belgrade Pride in 2001, members of the LGBT+ community have encountered rejection from different sources. Although it is generally acknowledged that politics and mass media play an important role in the way that societies come to terms with queerness, there is little empirical knowledge about whether and how mass media actually contribute to the process of raising awareness and legitimation and increasing visibility. The study aims to assess changes in the online framing of the Serbian newspaper blic by analyzing the Belgrade Pride of each year from 2014 to 2024. The concept of media framing analysis is employed to elucidate the structural and dynamic interactions between the LGBT+ community and the (in)tolerant segment of the Serbian society. Furthermore, the aim of the analysis is to identify the various frames utilized in the media coverage, with a particular focus on the reporting and the actors that shape the discourse surrounding queerness. The primary argument is that, although the reporting has not resulted in significant shifts in framing, it provides a lens through which discussions about LGBT+ visibility and representation in Serbia can be conducted.