Movement Building---discursive framing determines justice---it’s a prior question to governance and practice.

A discourse can be conceptualized as an evolving way that people think and talk about a given aspect of reality, which influences their perceptions and social practices in relation to that aspect of reality. Thus, we can conceive of discourses on governance, on the economy, on human rights, or on the environment, each of which can influence perceptions and practices in their respective domains. Discourses contain structural properties, such as interpretive frames, that partially determine their influence on our perceptions and practices. With this in mind, struggles for peace and justice can be understood, in part, as struggles to reframe significant public discourses. Toward this end, the discussion that follows begins with an overview of contemporary efforts to conceptualize discourse. It then examines the concept of an interpretive frame as a key structural property of discourses. In turn, three overarching ways of framing public discourses, each based on a different understanding of human nature and social reality, are posited. The first two, the social command frame and the social contest frame, can be understood as hegemonic frames that perpetuate social conflict and injustice. The third frame, the social body frame, is offered as a normative alternative that derives from recognition of humanity’s increasing global interdependence. The discussion concludes by arguing that, at this critical juncture in human history, struggles for peace and justice should be understood, in part, as struggles to reframe public discourses according to the logic of interdependence expressed by the social body frame.

Conceptualizing Discourse

Most efforts to conceptualize discourse rest on the underlying premise that language and language use do not merely reflect or represent our social and mental realities, they also play a role in constructing or structuring these realities. This conception of discourse as a structuring agent is now accepted within diverse schools of thought that span the disciplines of anthropology, communication, linguistics, literary studies, political science, social psychology, and sociology, as well as interdisciplinary fields such as cultural studies. Though people still debate the relative influence of discourse, or the nature of that influence, or how to best study it, discourse theory has established itself as an influential framework for social analysis and activism.

This broad conception of discourse encompasses diverse approaches to inquiry (refer to discussions in McKinlay and McVittie 2008; Phillips and Hardy 2002; Schiffrin, Tannen, and Hamilton 2001). Among these diverse approaches, an approach known as critical discourse analysis is especially relevant to struggles for peace and justice. Critical discourse analysis tends to examine discourse in its broad social and historical context; it tends to be change oriented in its focus; and it is concerned with the ways that power dynamics produce and are reproduced by dominant or hegemonic discourses through the construction of meaning, knowledge, and ideology (van Dijk 2001). For example, critical discourse analysis points out that if one is raised in a social environment in which people think and talk about gender in highly patriarchal and oppressive ways, then one is more likely to enact and perpetuate gendered practices that are patriarchal and oppressive. Of course, the direction of influence between discourse and social practice is not one way. Gendered practices also influence the way people think and talk about gender. Thus, the relationship between discourse and social practice is dialectical—each influences or informs the other. However, within this dialectical relationship, discourse can act as an agent that structures, to some degree, our “common sense” views about reality, which in turn shape related social practices, even as those social practices also inform the discourses associated with them. Furthermore, as critical discourse analysis points out, all of this occurs within a field of power relations that can shape the direction these dialectical feedback processes lead over time.