Week 6: Felstiner/Abel/Sarat, Alicke, and Wiethoff - Naming, Blaming, Claiming

I have to apologize in advance--I've been extremely sick the past few days, so this might come off as a little incoherent.

"The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming and Claiming" - Felstiner, Abel and Sarat

This article created a new framework for analyzing the conception and creation of disputes based on a transformation model. This model utilizes the three stages of naming--recognizing an injurious experience as injurious; blaming--holding a party guilty for the injurious experience; and claiming--pursuing reparations and legal processes. In simpler terms, naming refers to perceived injurious experiences (PIEs, yes, PIEs), blaming is when those PIEs become grievances, and claiming is when grievances turn into actual disputes.

I liked this framework, mostly because it was easy to understand and made sense. It looks at individuals and how one's personal background and social location influence how they perceive something as injurious or not injurious. It also shows that the argument that the US is a sue-happy nation doesn't really hold water. A person first has to have the cognizance to perceive something as an injurious experience, and after that there is a long psychological process from perceiving something as injurious to transforming it into an actual legal dispute. A lot of it depends upon one's personal background as well as one's status--in other words, just how much access to the legal system they have.


"Culpable Control and the Psychology of Blame" - Mark D. Alicke

This article was, at least as far as I know, about establishing a culpable control framework to describe how people come to blame other people.

Honestly, I have very little to say about this article. I had no idea what it was talking about or what it's real point was, even less so since I was expecting it to actually go into the psychology of how people come to blame others--but it didn't. It was all a bunch of complicated terms and dense topics, not to mention the links and such, which I didn't understand at all. All of this might have been compounded by my cold, but I don't know. Sorry, guys, I got nothing.


"Naming, Blaming and Claiming in Public Disputes" - Carolyn Wiethoff

This article took Felstiner/Abel/Sarat's framework about naming, blaming and claiming to a new level, analyzing how naming, blaming and claiming took place in a particular public referendum. Wiethoff analyzes the arguments constructed by conservatives in a 1998 repeal of a civil rights act that protected the rights of GLBT individuals. In particular she looked at the strengths of their argument and the weakness of pro-GLBT counter-arguments.

This was a fascinating article. I feel like one of the most detrimental things to any civil rights movement is the lack of suitable counter-arguments. As Wiethoff points out, the referendum of 1998 passed because conservatives were successfully able to appeal to other conservatives as well as to general voters. They constructed arguments using a naming, blaming and claiming framework that, while not logically sound, at least appealed to voters who either had a similar agenda or didn't have the knowledge or desire to actually do their own research. Wiethoff says that people rely on schemas until the schema's fidelity is called into question. Anyone who wants to cause change in the world needs to have a good framework with which to form arguments and counter-arguments if they want to get anywhere.