Open Hearts or Smoke and Mirrors: Metaphorical Framing and Frame Conflicts in a Public Meeting

Abstract

The concept of framing has been widely used to help understand how aspects of messages can shape people’s expectations and consequently influence the outcomes of communicative interactions. In this study we examine transcripts of a contentious and ultimately unsuccessful public meeting between police officials and members of the African American community following the fatal shooting of a young African American woman by police officers. We show how contradictory framing between public officials and members of the community as well as within each group may have contributed to unintended and asymmetrical ironies, and ultimately to the failure of the meeting to achieve the objectives of either group. We suggest steps that might lead to better outcomes in similar situations in the future.

FUNDING

This research was supported by the UK Economic and Social Research Council Research Fellowship ESRC RES 071270039, awarded to Lynne Cameron.

Notes

1. ¹In this essay, metaphor vehicles are marked by underlining. “Conceptual metaphors” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) are indicated by small capital letters, and “systematic metaphors” (Cameron, 2007) are indicated by italicized small capital letters. Note that vehicle is itself a metaphor, expressing the idea that it carries meaning associated with the topic. The conceptual or systematic metaphor underlying both vehicle and carry can be identified as something like MEANINGS ARE OBJECTS and WORDS ARE CONTAINERS (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980).

3. ²The transcript of this meeting was downloaded by Yves Labissiere, Associate Professor of Psychology at Portland State University, in November, 2007 from the Portland Police Bureau web page, http://www.portlandonline.com/police/.

4. ³Burger Barn refers to an incident in which off-duty police officers left a dead opossum in front of a fast-food restaurant popular with African Americans. Tony Stevens attempted to restrain a white man who attempted to hold up a convenience store; when police arrived in response to the clerk’s call, they assumed Stevens was the perpetrator and wrestled him to the floor with a choke-hold that ended in Stevens’s death. See Ritchie (2010, 2011).

5. ⁴Gibbs and Izett (2005) adapted this terminology from Kaufer (1977).