Call for papers Vol. 5 No. 1 (2026) – Cognition and Framing
Posted on 2025-11-27Cognition and Framing
CfP – nCognito Journal 2026/1
Since the 1970s, the concept of framing has become one of the central categories in the social sciences and the humanities, functioning as an organizing principle of cognition and cultural practices. According to relevant theories, processes of meaning-making—across the many dimensions of communication—can be described as linguistic, narrative, dramaturgical, or visual forms of framing that mediate cognitive and cultural schemas (spatio-temporal concepts for understanding reality, causal and semantic relations, value structures, etc.). Theories employing the concept of framing attempt to describe, at various levels of communication and across different media, the processes through which—by activating certain schemas and background knowledge—the objects of attention and the modes of meaning-making and interpretation are implicitly or explicitly designated. Conceptually, framing is a metaphor that primarily suggests that something is foregrounded and placed within a field of meaning or interpretive context, and secondarily—though somewhat misleadingly—that the same thing might appear within a different medium or relational structure. Beyond theoretical contexts, framing is increasingly popular as a marketing and communication technique or a stylistic phenomenon, aimed at selecting and “reframing” communicative acts in ways that shape public discourse and collective thinking.
The concepts and theories of frame and framing span a wide disciplinary spectrum and, although they consistently reference the cognitive preconditions of perception, understanding, and interpretation, they do not form a unified framework. In linguistics, the notion of frame suggests that meaning is tied to conceptual structures, and that language operates through the activation of schemas and background knowledge stored in long-term memory—for instance, metaphor can itself be understood as a form of framing that conceptually shapes thought. In visual culture, framing makes visible the demarcation by which a representation is extracted from its real-world environment, and implicitly and/or explicitly indicates that perceived stimuli and information are interpreted through cognitive schemas and cultural contexts that depend on the framing and situation. This idea also informs theories of literary reception, in which fictional frames mark the conventions that enable the “as-if” interpretation of alternative worlds and narratives while maintaining the boundary between reality and symbolic representation. Fictional (medial, narrative, dramatic, theatrical, etc.) framing opens a special space of play for interpretation, in which certain referential relations are suspended; thus, the representations in question can be grasped on multiple levels and in multiple senses on the basis of (meta)fictional, (para)textual, or parabatic signals. Social-psychological approaches emphasize the dynamic processes of framing: frames convey interpretive directions and expectations and may shift even within the same communicative situation, as their meanings are difficult to stabilize and the consensus they imply is often only apparent. Frames can mediate schemas, shared background knowledge, or context even without explicit linguistic markers, flexibly shaping the meaning of a given situation or utterance.
We welcome English-language abstracts of no more than 200 words by 15 January 2026 at the following email addresses: juditszabojudit@gmail.com or horvathmarta8@gmail.com. Please include a bibliography with the abstract.
Literature
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Entman, Robert M.: Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm. Journal of Communication 43(4), 1993, 51–58.
Fludernik, Monika: Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London/New York: Routledge, 1996.
Goffman, Erving: Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.
Herman, David: Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln/London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
--Basic Elements of Narrative. Malden, MA/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.
Kahneman, Daniel & Tversky, Amos: Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica 47(2), 1979, 263–291.
--The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice. Science 211(4481), 1981, 453–458. https://sites.stat.columbia.edu/gelman/surveys.course/TverskyKahneman1981.pdf
Kirchmeier, Christian: Parabasis. Literarische Wirklichkeit im Zeitalter der Repräsentation. Wallstein 2023.
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Lakoff, George: Don’t Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004.
Scheufele, Dietram A.: Framing as a Theory of Media Effects. Journal of Communication 49(1), 1999, 103–122. doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1999.tb02784.x
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Reese, Stephen D.; Gandy, Oscar H.; Grant, August E. (ed.): Framing Public Life: Perspectives on Media and Our Understanding of the Social World. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.