How can we use communications research to inform the reframing of immigration? That is the question being addressed by the 25 participants in the FrameWorks Institute's new Study Circle funded by the California Endowment.  The Study Circle, based in Los Angeles, is an intensive six-month engagement with policy experts and advocates who want to explore how to integrate FrameWorks' communications recommendations into their work on immigration-related issues, from immigration reform to healthcare and education. 

Most people recognize that, on some level, all Americans come from immigrant backgrounds.  Still, Americans' beliefs about inclusion and exclusion and their opinions about what specifically constitutes effective immigration reform are often unclear and inconsistent.  Drawing from several years of qualitative and quantitative research on public attitudes to immigration and race, FrameWorks suggests better ways to frame the issue.  In Study Circle meetings, blogs and collaborative materials development, California advocates are experimenting with research-based strategies for informing their communications and avoiding the unproductive thinking that results from the frames currently dominant in public discourse.  Leading the conversation are Frank Gilliam, Senior Fellow and Dean of the School of Public Affairs at UCLA, Tiffany Manuel, Director of Institutional Impact and Evaluation, and newly appointed Senior Associate Yndia Lorick-Wilmot.

Advocates and experts who want to integrate framing into their daily practice often find themselves in a tough spot when they hire public relations or advertising firms that practice a form of communications grounded in product marketing.  Recently, the Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City (HCF) came up with an innovative way to ensure that a framing perspective on social issues informed its new campaign on health care.  

In its RFP to advertising agencies, the Foundation asked candidate firms to demonstrate their understanding of FrameWorks' research and findings. The grant was awarded to Trozzolo Communications Group, a full-service agency based in Kansas City, and since then, FrameWorks has been working with Trozzolo and HCF to help design and implement a non-partisan campaign to help people understand how the new bill puts the nation on a path to building a viable health care system. By inviting creative personnel into a research-based strategy, HCF has been able to ensure that messages are grounded in evidence without limiting creativity.  Stay tuned for more examples of this kind of collaboration between FrameWorks and the creative firms that implement issues campaigns.

FrameWorks' team continues to grow.   We now have more than a dozen full-time staff members with a diverse range of backgrounds and professional experiences - from anthropology, political science and psychology, to public policy, social work and journalism.

Yndia Lorick-Wilmot is the latest addition to our team.  A trained sociologist with a B.A. from Trinity College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Northeastern University, Yndia's work has focused on the experience of marginalized racial-ethnics and immigrants, and concentrates on the reduction of inequality.  Yndia is the author of Creating Black Caribbean Ethnic Identity, part of the series The New Americans: Recent Immigration and American Society (LFB Academic Publishing). 

The following is a semi-regular feature highlighting what FrameWorks staff members are reading, viewing, or listening to these days.  We are always learning about framing, so our night tables are cumbersome.  We suspect you might be interested in some of the same books.  We invite submissions from colleagues in the field - read a good book about framing lately?

Rob Shore, Junior Associate

Sennett, Richard.  The Fall of Public Man: On the Social Psychology of Capitalism.  New York: Random House, 1974.  

Much of FrameWorks' research addresses issues of conflict between public and private responsibilities.  It's an enduring focus in American intellectual thought and public debate.  Sennett's The Fall of Public Man is an exhaustive socio-historical examination of the death of public society and the rise of what might be called "psychiety": a collection of individual personalities, seeking individuated meanings from the world.  The book fills the historical space between de Tocqueville and Robert Putnam's work on American civics, and describes a civilization that has traded in ritual, myth, and symbolic life for what, Sennett argues, is the self-defeating and self-obsessed pursuit of intimacy and "warmth." The world Sennett describes is one in which family is seen a safe haven from the corrupted and corrupting public sphere, in which electronic communications have streamlined simplicity and created a plague of passivity.  It's a world in which relationships are at once ephemeral and easily replaceable.  Incredibly, it's a world that predates Twitter by more than thirty years.  And it's important to framers who must contend with the diminishing definition of "public-ness."     

Tiffany Manuel, Director of Institutional Impact and Evaluation

Lareau, Annette.  Unequal Childhoods; Class, Race, and Family Life.  University of California Press, 2003.   

Annette Lareau's ethnographic account of how class affects parenting strategies has been making the rounds of serious academic blogs for quite some time now.   "Lareau shows how middle-class parents, whether black or white, engage in a process of 'concerted cultivation' designed to draw out children's talents and skills, while working-class and poor families rely on 'the accomplishment of natural growth,' in which a child's development unfolds spontaneously-as long as basic comfort, food, and shelter are provided.  Each of these approaches to childrearing brings its own benefits and its own drawbacks." This work has a natural connection to FrameWorks' research on early child development by identifying the challenges that economic inequality poses on effective parenting. Lareau does not argue that economic inequality shapes people's conceptual understanding of child development (only that those challenges shape parenting "behavior") but it invites us to ponder the connection between economic circumstances and conceptual understanding.  

Eric Lindland, Senior Researcher

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly.  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.  Harper Perennial, 1991.


As FrameWorks continues its work on early child development and undertakes new work on the relationship of digital media to learning (see our next issue of the Framer's Almanac), the work of Csikszentmihalyi, formerly chair of the University of Chicago's psychology department, becomes more and more relevant.  Central to his argument is the idea of play as a constituent feature of healthy human development and of the desirability of embracing many of the features of play in other arenas of human life:  the setting of goals, the cultivation of skills, the embracing of challenge, and the often-thrilling paradox of seeking to cultivate/gain control in the midst of circumstances beyond one's control that is so common to many games and sports.

Csikszentmihalyi starts the book with Aristotle's dictum that, more than anything, people seek to be happy and argues that being in control of one's own consciousness is the key to living a fulfilling and (hopefully) happy life.  He notes the very real challenge in accomplishing that goal, a challenge that comes, he suggests, because the human mind is (like everything else in nature) subject to forces of entropy. Thus an ordered consciousness does not just happen, but requires inputs of energy, effort, and cultivation - from a nurturing environment (especially during
childhood) and through sets of practices whereby individuals learn to set goals for themselves, seek to match skills to challenges, and find ways to enjoy the process of striving on its own merits (the proverbial "journey," not just the destination).  Stay tuned for new research from FrameWorks on executive function that is highly germane to this body of work.