Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview PhD pre-conference seminar Author(s) Kamila Vlckova Charles University Prague Czech Republic Title Policy of free Lunches for Children from Unprivileged Families in the Czech Republic – Discourses and Frames File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Kamila Vlckova Abstract Child poverty has many different causes and consequences. It is a multidimensional problem and there is not any simple universal solution. Social, health and economic factors have to be taken into account. It is difficult to reach the consensus of many different actors with various interests and values. Although all actors reach agreement on the need to address the problem of child poverty, there is not conformity about its complex solution and the problem itself stays at the edge of attention of politicians and media. Child poverty is an unstructured problem, however, if we focus only on one of its aspects (or dimensions), we can raise the level of the “structuredness” and increase chances of achieving the political output. This has happened in the Czech Republic, in the case of the policy of free lunches when the whole problem was restructured and narrowed to “food deprivation of children”. Thanks to its clarity and framing, policy of free lunches has gotten into the media agenda and is generally supported by the public. For the first time, McCombs and Shaws (1993) have already assumed that the reports contain information on a public issue - thus creating the agenda - and at the same time highlighting or concealing some attributes of the public problem. Similarly, Cobb and Elder (1983) point out that definition and structuration of problem are essentially important for the public support. The main goal of my paper is to identify frames and media discourse connected with the policy of free lunches. The paper stays on the concept of Discourse and Framing Theory. I conducted a case study on policy of free lunches for unprivileged children, and I tried to get a deep insight into the issue and especially to map the media discourse. I made a content analysis (thematic and discourse) of selected media messages with the goal to examine discourses and identify frames connected with policy of free lunches. Frames (Barisione 2010) actually can tell us how people think about public issues and discourses are like a tool of social construction of reality, as products of power relations and ideologies (Van Dijk 2002). Discourses determine what is "normal", what is stigmatizing, hierarchizing, etc. Discourses help us to reveal how social reality is created at the time (epoch). I target on policy of free lunches because in this case, policy was able to gain wide public support which is crucial for the success of policies for achieving and maintaining political outputs. The main goal of my PhD thesis is to examine the frameworks and discourses in the problem of child poverty. I focus on two specific policies - free lunches for children and enforced alimonies. In the first case, it is a policy that has already been implemented and some of its results are traceable. In the latter case, it is only hypothetical policy, which may be implemented in the future. Although both policies are addressing the situation of children (and therefore the whole problem of child poverty), public opinion is quite different. The policy of free lunches is generally welcomed, while the enforced alimonies have so far been rejected by the public.
