Arguing Along Fault-lines — How Rhetorical Practices Polarize Debates Over Wildlife Comeback

To understand the way conversations contribute to processes of increasing polarization in multiparty conflict situations, Noelle Aarts will discuss how combining frame analysis with stasis analysis can illuminate the nature of these kinds of debates, using examples such as the case of the return of wildlife in Flanders, Belgium.

Noelle Aarts has found that combining frame analysis with stasis analysis is valuable for understanding how multiparty conflicts evolve in conversations and can become even more intractable in the interplay of conversations in different contexts and at different levels. This reveals how our seemingly unimportant day-to-day discussions, in the end, shape societal structures and developments in ways that no one may have ever intended.

About the Speaker

Noelle Aarts is director of and works as a full professor of Socio-Ecological Interactions at the Institute for Science in Society (ISiS) of the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She studies everyday conversations about complex life science-related issues (e.g. climate change, biodiversity decrease, food production), including how these conversations relate to structures and developments at wider societal and institutional levels. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she makes use of qualitative research methods such as semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, participatory observation, and interactional frame analysis of real-life conversations.