Poverty as a Discursive Infrastructure: Framing Effects, Economic Agency, and Urban Marginalization in the Philippines

This qualitative research investigates the constitutive role of communicative framing in the production and internalization of economic poverty among urban poor residents in Manila, Philippines. Anchored in the framing theory and situated within a communication-centric analytic paradigm, the study utilizes semi-structured interviews to examine how macro-level discursive formations emanating from state, media, and institutional actors are translated into micro-level interpretive schemas through which marginalized subjects perceive economic deprivation, agency, and futurity. The analysis demonstrates that participants’ narratives are permeated by hegemonic frames of dependency, passivity, and moralized deservingness, which operate as symbolic constraints that delimit perceived economic agency and normalize structural exclusion. The study contends that communication functions not merely as a descriptive or mediating apparatus but as an infrastructural dimension of economic inequality itself, actively configuring the conditions of possibility for economic action. To deepen the paper’s theoretical portability, we introduce the Communicative Architecture of Governed Exclusion (CAGE) as a mid-range framework specifying how poverty is reproduced through 1) classification (what counts as poverty and who counts as poor); 2) access control (administrative and informational gatekeeping), 3) governance through discourse (moralized narratives of deservingness and dependency), and 4) exclusion effects (internalized passivity, “waiting orientation,” and self-limiting economic agency). CAGE clarifies how framing effects become durable social infrastructure—an architecture that governs inclusion and exclusion through everyday communication.