No abstract

Scholars are increasingly examining how gender interacts with food security, with specific attention given to women. This is not surprising, given that women make up 43% of the global agricultural labor force and are responsible for producing almost half of the global agricultural food supply. Since women tend to be disproportionately responsible for taking care of household activities, including the production, purchase, preparation, and allocation of food‐based resources—particularly in the developing world—there is a scholarly consensus that an improvement in women's status has a positive impact on nutritional outcomes. Current scholarship on gender and food security is thus broadly divided into relationships between food security and women's economic freedoms, legal opportunities, and both formal and informal education via improved knowledge of agricultural procedures. In this review, I draw attention to the role that sociologists can play in engaging these topics, and I specifically highlight the need to conduct more cross‐national and longitudinal analyses of women's status and food security. Finally, I point towards recent studies that assess the impacts of Information and Communication Technologies on food security, and suggest the need to explicate the role of gender within such processes.

No abstract

The global digital divide is a pressing contemporary form of inequality, especially considering the increased salience of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the post-pandemic world. Despite unequal rates of expansion across the developing world, processes that explain disparities in digital technology access are under-studied from macro, cross-national sociological perspectives. This longitudinal study evaluates factors associated with access to mobile phones across 133 developing countries from 1995 to 2014, the key period of rapid ICT expansion worldwide. We investigate two major global sociological theories, dependency and world society, to determine the processes that best explain unequal access between developing states. Using negative binomial count models within a generalized estimating equation framework, we find that the global digital divide is exacerbated by (1) larger rural populations at the state level and (2) higher levels of dependence, as measured by foreign direct investment, export concentration, and domestic fiscal independence. We also find that internal characteristics of economically dependent states work in combination to worsen the digital divide; specifically, we find that the negative effect of rurality on subscriptions is heightened in states with less domestic fiscal independence. Finally, we find limited evidence that world society institutionalization of ICT norms has a positive effect on access to mobile phones globally; however, the relationship between state-level measures of world society penetration and mobile phone subscriptions is unclear.

In recent decades, anti-systemic movements feature new forms of communication for organizing efforts: the use of information and communication technologies. Research on information and communication technologies suggests that mobile phones and internet access have increasingly facilitated horizontal communication for anti-systemic movements across the world-system, creating space for rapid and instantaneous organization and mobilization. However, existing scholarship benefits from a critical evaluation of claims about horizontality by addressing the political economy of information and communication technologies from a world-systems analysis perspective. Specifically, information and communication technology devices and platforms—from cellphones to social media channels—are designed by powerful corporations that are often based in powerful core and semi-periphery nations. The majority of these corporations are based in the hegemonic core of the United States. Within the present context of waning material resources across the world-system, these corporations profit from an online attention economy. Just as traditional material economies exploit the labor and natural resources from the periphery to extract wealth for core states, the attention economy exploits the psychologies and behaviors of periphery populations to extract wealth for core countries. Thus, some of the most powerful institutions in the world-system control the algorithms and structures where anti-systemic movements compete for peoples’ attention. This study utilizes the Mass Mobilization Data Project 1990-2018 historical dataset to determine which kinds of anti-systemic movements thrive as information and communication technology access expands globally. Using population-averaged negative binomial panel models on protest counts, I determine that as information and communication technologies expand, anti-systemic movements that are unlikely to threaten U.S. hegemony thrive, and conversely, anti-systemic movements that pose serious threats to U.S. hegemony and the present capitalist world-system are stifled. To unpack these findings, I draw from the cultural political economy approach, a framework that describes how some imaginations become a zeitgeist over competing imaginations for economic and political realities.