17 pages., Via online journal., Food waste has emerged as a major issue in the United States as the nation collectively sends more than 133 billion pounds of food to its landfills every year. In September 2015, the USDA and EPA announced an initiative to cut U.S. food waste in half by 2030. Between 2015 and 2016, nearly 100,000 posts about food waste have been published on Twitter, a microblogging platform that has been a hub of “slacktivism” since its inception in 2006. Using a conceptual framework of social cognitive theory, online activism, and crowdsourcing, we analyzed food waste conversation participants’ demographics, online communities, and proposed solutions. Data analysis was conducted with listening software Sysomos MAP and a qualitative content analysis of conversation content. The analysis revealed that more than 2,000 U.S. users engaged in the conversation, forming four discrete conversation communities led by influencers from government, news media, and environmental organizations. Proposed solutions to the food waste crisis included domestic or household behavior change, food-waste diversion and donation, recycling and upcycling, consumer education, and governmental action and policy. We recommend using Twitter to mine, test, and deploy solutions for combating food waste; engage with influential users; and disseminate materials for further research into the behavioral implications of online activism related to food waste.
25 pages., via online journal, Rural internet use, although still limited, is growing, raising the question of how rural people are using social media politically. As a vehicle of communication that permits the rapid transmission of information, images and text across space and connections between dispersed networks of individuals, does technological advance in rural areas presage significant political transformations? This article investigates this question in the light of a poor result for the Cambodian People’s Party in the 2013 elections, and the subsequent banning of the main opposition party, before the 2018 elections. Expanding internet use in rural areas has linked relatively quiescent rural Cambodians for the first time to networks of information about militant urban movements of the poor. Rural Cambodians are responding to this opportunity through strategies of quiet encroachment in cyberspace. This has had real effects on the nature of the relationship between the dominant party and the rural population and suggests the declining utility of the election-winning strategy used by the party since 1993. However, the extent of this virtual information revolution is limited, since neither the urban nor rural poor are mapping out new online political strategies, agendas or identities that can push Cambodia’s sclerotic politics in new directions.
7 pages., via online journal., This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research,
energy communication, that shares with environmental communication
the fraught commitment to simultaneously study communication as
an ordinary yet potentially transformative practice, and a strategic
endeavour to catalyse change. We begin by defining and situating energy
communication within ongoing work on the discursive dimensions of
energy extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. We then
offer three generative directions for future research related to energy
transitions as communicative processes: analysing campaigns’ strategic
efforts, critically theorizing energy’s transnational power dynamics, and
theorizing the energy democracy movement.
12 pages., Online via UI electronic subscription, Analysis of five cases of peak social media activity in the Dutch livestock sector. Findings indicated that social media hypes revolved around activism, scandals, and conflicts - each with characteristic patterns of activity, framing, interaction and media interplay. "Our results show the need to adopt a proactive and interactive approach that transcends the view of social media as a mere communication channel to respond in crisis situations."
21 pages., Online via UI e-subscription, "This paper exposes the failure of government institutions to protect animals on factory farms while simultaneously silencing what is currently the only available mechanism for Americans to learn about abuse on factory farms. It also explores the Constitutional implications of Ag-Gag laws.
15 pages, The post-war Western world has seen a gradual shift from government to governance, a process that also concerned the issues related to agro-food sustainability, such as food quality, environmental impact, social justice, and farm animal welfare. Scholars believe that social media are a new site that reconfigures relations between various actors involved in the governance of these problems. However, empirical research on this matter remains scarce. This paper fills this gap by examining the case of Februdairy, a Twitter hashtag campaign to promote the British dairy industry, hijacked by animal protection activists. For this case, I employ the relational perspective on technology affordances—as operationalised by Faraj and Azad (in: Leonard et al. (eds), Materiality and organizing. Social interaction in a technological world, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012)—to highlight two distinct strategic modes of embracement of social media functionalities by the opposing groups: hashtag hijacking and crowdsourcing transparency. The analysis reveals also that a pre-existing social structure of the agro-food system conditions reconfiguration of social relations by technology in a way that actually strengthens the tendency to govern the issue of farm animal protection with market mechanisms.
15 pages, his article examines the role that civic agriculture in Georgia (US) plays in shaping attitudes, strategies, and relationships that foster both sustainability and adaptation to a changing climate. Civic agriculture is a social movement that attracts a specific type of "activist" farmer, who is linked to a strong social network that includes other farmers and consumers. Positioning farmers' practices within a social movement broadens the understanding of adaptive capacity beyond how farmers adapt to understand why they do so. By drawing upon qualitative and quantitative data and by focusing on the cosmological, organizational, and technical dimensions of the social movement, the study illuminates how social values and networks shape production and marketing strategies that enable farmers to share resources and risks. We propose a conceptual framework for understanding how technical and social strategies aimed to address the sustainability goals of the movement also increase adaptive capacity at multiple timescales. In conclusion, we outline directions for future research, including the need for longitudinal studies that focus on consumer motivation and willingness to pay, the effects of scale on consumer loyalty and producer cooperation, and the role of a social movement in climate change adaptation. Finally, we stress that farmers' ability to thrive in uncertain climate futures calls for transformative approaches to sustainable agriculture that support the development of strong social networks.
11 pages, In the new public space shaped by short, fast, and networked interactions on social media, single keywords, often used in combination with a hashtag, have become important framing devices that structure conversations and communities. This study provides insight into how keywords become dominant framing devices. We conduct a longitudinal comparative case study on the emergence and evolution of two dominant keywords in the Dutch livestock debate: plofkip (booster-broiler) and megastal (megastable). Based on an analysis of social media messages, news articles, and policy debates and documents, we study the role of keywords in semantic fields, communication strategies, and policy practices. We present four dynamics that help to understand how keywords become 'master terms': (1) loaded keywords for contested politicized objects can become powerful framing devices because they carry normative meaning and yet are open enough to be applied widely; (2) if activists explicitly and consistently relate the meaning of a loaded term to realities and responsibilities in the sector, the term becomes the signifier of an activist frame: (3) counter terms and frames increase attention, broaden the involvement of actors and deepen the conversation to a value-based debate, through which keywords become master terms: (4) master terms shape policy practices, which in turn reinforces the affordance of the terms in the conversation. We propose the concept of 'master term' as a keyword that not only reflects, but activates and establishes a master frame around which conversations and practices revolve. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
4pgs, A wetland contaminated by industrial waste is slowly coming back to life. Nature’s tenacity found a powerful ally in a kayak tours operator and her many volunteers.
