Book-based session: Gender, Food, and COVID-19: Stories of Harm and Hope

For this session, we will share a preview of our upcoming edited volume titled, “Gender, Food, and COVID: Stories of Harm and Hope.” This book includes contributions from authors and research areas from across the globe and documents the impact of COVID-19 on gender and the food system with on-the-ground accounts and personal reflections. During the coronavirus pandemic with many people under lockdown, continual agricultural production and access to food remain essential. Women provide much of the formal and informal work in agriculture and food production, distribution, and preparation often under precarious conditions. The chapters range in content across the four themes of the book and geographically diverse parts of the world. During the session, we invite scholars and practitioners from across the globe to share from their chapters and provide their timely observations on these issues as well as more personal reflections on its impact on their lives and work. Our book presents four major themes that emerge from these accounts and are interwoven throughout: the pervasiveness of food insecurity, the ubiquity of women’s care work, food justice, and research methods and policies that can result in a resilience that reimagines the future for greater gender and intersectional equality. We will touch on these thematic areas and have an open discussion of COVID impacts on gender, food, and agriculture for all of the participants.

 

Moderator/organisers:

Paige Castelllanos, Carolyn E. Sachs and Ann R. Tickamyer, Pennsylvania State University, USA

 

Introduction by organizers and roundtable with invited chapter authors:

  • Stephanie Leder, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
  • Sovanneary Huot, Pennsylvania State University, USA
  • Hannah Budge and Sally Shortall, Newcastle University, UK
  • Emily Southard, Pennsylvania State University, USA
  • Michaela Hoffelmeyer, Pennsylvania State University, USA
  • Lilian Nkengla-Asi, M. Rosario Castro Bernardini, and Marc Cohen, Oxfam America

Recordings