TY - JOUR
T1 - Who should feed hungry families during crisis?
T2 - Moral claims about hunger on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic
AU - Oleschuk, Merin
N1 - Funding Information:
I am very grateful to Anelyse Weiler and Sarah Elton for their valuable feedback on multiple drafts of this manuscript, as well as to Yousaf Shah for his technical support through the data mining process. I would also like to thank Dwayne Smith who provided a complimentary social media data mining workshop to members of the Sociologists for Women in Society, and which provided the impetus and foundational know-how for the data mining project. Versions of this paper were also presented at the American Sociology Association Annual Meeting as well as the Joint Annual Meetings of the Association for the Study of Food and Society and the Agriculture, Food, and Human Values Society, and benefitted from the feedback received at those venues. I would also like to thank Matthew R. Sanderson and the three anonymous reviewers for pushing the paper’s analytical direction forward and helping see it to completion.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - How do crisis conditions affect longstanding societal narratives about hunger? This paper examines how hunger was framed in public discourse during an early period in the COVID-19 crisis to mobilize attention and make moral claims on others to alleviate it. It does so through a discourse analysis of 1023 U.S.-based English-language posts dedicated to hunger on Twitter during four months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis finds that Twitter users chiefly adopted hunger as a political tool to make moral claims on the state rather than individuals, civil society organizations, or corporations; however, hunger was deployed to defend widely diverse political agendas ranging from progressive support for SNAP entitlements to conservative claims reinforcing anti-lockdown and racist "America First" sentiments. Theoretically, the paper contributes to understanding how culture and morality operate in times of crisis. It demonstrates how culture can be deployed in crisis to reinforce longstanding ideological commitments at the same time that it organizes political imaginations in new ways. The result, in this case, is that longstanding cultural narratives about hunger were used to defend dissimilar, and in some ways contradictory, political ends. Practically, the paper demonstrates how moralized calls to alleviate hunger are vulnerable to political manipulation and used to further conflicting political goals, yet may also offer opportunities to leverage support for bolstered state investments in food assistance during times of crisis.
AB - How do crisis conditions affect longstanding societal narratives about hunger? This paper examines how hunger was framed in public discourse during an early period in the COVID-19 crisis to mobilize attention and make moral claims on others to alleviate it. It does so through a discourse analysis of 1023 U.S.-based English-language posts dedicated to hunger on Twitter during four months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis finds that Twitter users chiefly adopted hunger as a political tool to make moral claims on the state rather than individuals, civil society organizations, or corporations; however, hunger was deployed to defend widely diverse political agendas ranging from progressive support for SNAP entitlements to conservative claims reinforcing anti-lockdown and racist "America First" sentiments. Theoretically, the paper contributes to understanding how culture and morality operate in times of crisis. It demonstrates how culture can be deployed in crisis to reinforce longstanding ideological commitments at the same time that it organizes political imaginations in new ways. The result, in this case, is that longstanding cultural narratives about hunger were used to defend dissimilar, and in some ways contradictory, political ends. Practically, the paper demonstrates how moralized calls to alleviate hunger are vulnerable to political manipulation and used to further conflicting political goals, yet may also offer opportunities to leverage support for bolstered state investments in food assistance during times of crisis.
KW - Food Insecurity
KW - Discourse analysis
KW - Culture
KW - Social media
KW - Hunger
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85133407770&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85133407770&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/s10460-022-10333-2
DO - 10.1007/s10460-022-10333-2
M3 - Article
C2 - 35814733
SN - 0889-048X
VL - 39
SP - 1437
EP - 1449
JO - Agriculture and Human Values
JF - Agriculture and Human Values
IS - 4
ER -