Volume 34, Issue 3, September 2023, Page 1-21
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Category Archives: Arts and Health
Patterns, evolution and determinants of child trafficking in Henan Province, China
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Emotional status and emotional labour: exploring the emotional labour among casualised and tenured knowledge workers
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Finding a home in or through mobile phones: Access and usage patterns among homeless women in shelter-homes of India
Mobile Media &Communication, Ahead of Print.
With the number of mobile phone subscribers increasing across all sections of society, this paper aims to understand if homeless women in shelter-homes of India have access to mobile phones and, if so, what are their usage patterns. Facilitated by issues ranging from domestic violence to lack of employment to forced migration and even to human trafficking and rape, women residing in the shelter-homes of India have a myriad of stories to tell. Not all of them have been on streets forever and many have the basic literacy to understand how to use a mobile phone. For the purposes of the study, the researchers engaged with women above 18 years of age up to the age of 45 in a series of open-ended interviews to understand their access to mobile phones and contextualize their homelessness within an affordances-based framework for mobile phone access. This paper takes into account the dual barriers of gender and the lack of a home to study the digital divide experienced by homeless women in India, expanding on how both these factors shape their access and usage, eventually bridging the digital divide, and whether mobile phones are required/desired by the women themselves. The study found that the women staying in shelter-homes see a window of hope in their use of mobile phones in the form of an independent financial future or an independent marital life, but the biased perception of using a mobile phone among women hinders women’s access to and use of these devices, which ultimately results in the loss of any kind of opportunity before it has even been explored, perhaps leading to the loss of a chance at a bright future.
With the number of mobile phone subscribers increasing across all sections of society, this paper aims to understand if homeless women in shelter-homes of India have access to mobile phones and, if so, what are their usage patterns. Facilitated by issues ranging from domestic violence to lack of employment to forced migration and even to human trafficking and rape, women residing in the shelter-homes of India have a myriad of stories to tell. Not all of them have been on streets forever and many have the basic literacy to understand how to use a mobile phone. For the purposes of the study, the researchers engaged with women above 18 years of age up to the age of 45 in a series of open-ended interviews to understand their access to mobile phones and contextualize their homelessness within an affordances-based framework for mobile phone access. This paper takes into account the dual barriers of gender and the lack of a home to study the digital divide experienced by homeless women in India, expanding on how both these factors shape their access and usage, eventually bridging the digital divide, and whether mobile phones are required/desired by the women themselves. The study found that the women staying in shelter-homes see a window of hope in their use of mobile phones in the form of an independent financial future or an independent marital life, but the biased perception of using a mobile phone among women hinders women’s access to and use of these devices, which ultimately results in the loss of any kind of opportunity before it has even been explored, perhaps leading to the loss of a chance at a bright future.
Sexual peril and dangerous others: The moral economies of the trans prisoner policy debates in England and Wales
Sexualities, Ahead of Print.
This article analyses a widely publicised case in England, where a trans woman was remanded to a women’s prison and subsequently sexually assaulted other women prisoners. The article traces how the case was politically mobilised to support a growing backlash against trans rights in Britain. The article argues that the case was successfully deployed by trans-hostile groups because of a combination of carceral politics and sexual exceptionalism, which cut across both left and right politics and has roots in racialised narratives of ‘dangerous others'. These narratives, while ostensibly claiming to guard against sexual violence, paradoxically limit the capacity to meaningfully address underlying causes of sexual harm.
This article analyses a widely publicised case in England, where a trans woman was remanded to a women’s prison and subsequently sexually assaulted other women prisoners. The article traces how the case was politically mobilised to support a growing backlash against trans rights in Britain. The article argues that the case was successfully deployed by trans-hostile groups because of a combination of carceral politics and sexual exceptionalism, which cut across both left and right politics and has roots in racialised narratives of ‘dangerous others'. These narratives, while ostensibly claiming to guard against sexual violence, paradoxically limit the capacity to meaningfully address underlying causes of sexual harm.
Issue Information
No abstract is available for this article.
Behind the ‘creative destruction’ of human diets: An analysis of the structure and market dynamics of the ultra‐processed food manufacturing industry and implications for public health
Abstract
A global transition towards diets increasingly dominated by ultra-processed foods (UPFs) has occurred in recent decades to the detriment of public health and the environment. This study aimed to examine long-term trends in the structure and market dynamics of the global UPF manufacturing industry as part of broader efforts to understand the drivers of this transition. Using diverse methods, metrics and data sources, we examined several dimensions (e.g., industry concentration and profitability) according to an adapted structure–conduct–performance model. We found that the global UPF manufacturing industry has evolved to become a major component of global food systems, with its longstanding dominant corporations becoming some of the system's largest accumulators of profit and distributors of capital. It follows that reversing the global UPF dietary transition will require structural and regulatory changes to ensure that population diets, and food systems more broadly, are not subordinated to the interests of powerful for-profit business corporations.
Agrarian change through speculation: Rural elites as land brokers for mining in Colombia
Abstract
This paper studies the connections between the expansion of mining capital, speculative forms of land grabbing and agrarian transformation. It is argued that in periods of commodity boom, the landowning rural elite benefits from mining through speculative land deals with mining companies. They act as ‘land brokers’ for the mining firms, helping them to overcome a significant barrier to land accumulation through the de facto abolition of landed property. The analysis is based on a qualitative case study on the expansion of coal mining in central Cesar in northern Colombia. To develop my arguments, I refer to the concept of accumulation by dispossession as defined by Michael Levien, and historical materialist approaches on rent, and speculative land dispossession. In addition, I use concepts developed for studying coercive land grabbing and agrarian elite participation in armed conflicts to analyse the mechanisms applied to (coercively) acquire rights to land. It is concluded that with high global prices for minerals, metals and fossil fuels, the expansion of mining in the countryside fosters a process of agrarian change through land speculation that is articulated in a reconcentration of landed property, a re-strengthening of the rural landowning elite and the dissolution of peasant agriculture.
From creating to confronting racial hierarchies: The evolving role of the US state in land policy
Abstract
From systemically dispossessing Indigenous people of their territory for Euro-American settlement to routinely denying African American farmers operating loans in the 20th century, the US government's complicity in creating racial hierarchies in terms of land access is well documented. Less understood is how land policies oriented towards racial equity, namely, the Justice for Black Farmers Act (JBFA), and other initiatives that deal with land access as well as addressing racism more broadly, emerged during recent decades. In this article, we argue that such initiatives resulted from Black-led organizations and other farmer advocacy allies responding to neoliberal policy reforms. Concretely, even as these reforms destabilized farm economies, they also led to a decentralization of agricultural policy administration, which, in turn, created opportunities for community-based organizations to influence land governance. We make this argument after presenting a three-part periodization of the evolution of US land policy, starting with the emergence of racial hierarchies, then the period of partial reforms that began during the New Deal and, finally, the era of neoliberal reform.
Family farmers’ strategies to develop autonomy through agroecological and solidarity economy practices: The case of BioVida in the Ecuadorian Andes
Abstract
Considering the global restructuring affecting agrarian landscapes, we build on the concept of autonomy proposed by van der Ploeg and colleagues (but extended and critically complemented) to analyse how family farmers can build this autonomy to face rural capitalist tendencies and maintain their activities and identity. We offer insights from a case study in the Ecuadorian Andes, the BioVida organization that is linked to agroecological and social and solidarity economy movements. Our findings show that family farming autonomy is not being achieved homogeneously for the whole household but must be analysed through an intersectional approach. Furthermore, there are simultaneous processes to achieve different degrees of autonomy and (inter-)dependency, which are co-constitutive along gender and age lines and are conditioned by structural constraints. Therefore, for our case study area, agribusiness and family farming processes and spaces seem to operate co-constitutively rather than antagonistically in practical terms. Agroecology-based achievements so far act as a localized buffer against adversity rather than an emancipative territorial project of autonomy.