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Sociology

Clark University

Food security

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Narrating Agricultural Resilience After Hurricane María: How Smallholder Farmers In Puerto Rico Leverage Self-Sufficiency And Collaborative Agency In A Climate-Vulnerable Food System, Abrania Marrero, Andrea Lόpez-Cepero, Ramón Borges-Méndez, Josiemer Mattei Jun 2022

Narrating Agricultural Resilience After Hurricane María: How Smallholder Farmers In Puerto Rico Leverage Self-Sufficiency And Collaborative Agency In A Climate-Vulnerable Food System, Abrania Marrero, Andrea Lόpez-Cepero, Ramón Borges-Méndez, Josiemer Mattei

Sustainability and Social Justice

Climate change is a threat to food system stability, with small islands particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events. In Puerto Rico, a diminished agricultural sector and resulting food import dependence have been implicated in reduced diet quality, rural impoverishment, and periodic food insecurity during natural disasters. In contrast, smallholder farmers in Puerto Rico serve as cultural emblems of self-sufficient food production, providing fresh foods to local communities in an informal economy and leveraging traditional knowledge systems to manage varying ecological and climatic constraints. The current mixed methods study sought to document this expertise and employed a questionnaire and narrative interviewing …


A High-Frequency Mobile Phone Data Collection Approach For Research In Social-Environmental Systems: Applications In Climate Variability And Food Security In Sub-Saharan Africa, Stacey A. Giroux, Inna Kouper, Lyndon Estes, Jacob Schumacher, Kurt Waldman, Joel T. Greenshields, Stephanie L. Dickinson, Kelly K. Caylor, Tom P. Evans Sep 2019

A High-Frequency Mobile Phone Data Collection Approach For Research In Social-Environmental Systems: Applications In Climate Variability And Food Security In Sub-Saharan Africa, Stacey A. Giroux, Inna Kouper, Lyndon Estes, Jacob Schumacher, Kurt Waldman, Joel T. Greenshields, Stephanie L. Dickinson, Kelly K. Caylor, Tom P. Evans

Geography

Collecting high-frequency social-environmental data about farming practices in sub-Saharan Africa can provide new insight into environmental changes that farmers face and how they respond within smallholder agro-ecosystems. Traditional data collection methods such as agricultural censuses are costly and not useful for understanding intra-annual and real-time decisions. Short-message service (SMS) has the potential to transform the nature of data collection in coupled social-ecological systems. We present a system for collecting, managing, and synthesizing weekly data from farmers, including data infrastructure for management of big and heterogeneous datasets; probabilistic data quality assessment tools; and visualization and analysis tools such as mapping and …


Medicinal Plant Use And Health Sovereignty: Findings From The Tajik And Afghan Pamirs, Karim Aly Kassam, Munira Karamkhudoeva, Morgan Ruelle, Michelle Baumflek Dec 2010

Medicinal Plant Use And Health Sovereignty: Findings From The Tajik And Afghan Pamirs, Karim Aly Kassam, Munira Karamkhudoeva, Morgan Ruelle, Michelle Baumflek

Sustainability and Social Justice

Medicinal plants are indicators of indigenous knowledge in the context of political volatility and socio-cultural and ecological change in the Pamir Mountains of Afghanistan and Tajikistan. Medicinal plants are the primary health care option in this region of Central Asia. The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that medicinal plants contribute to health security and sovereignty in a time of instability. We illustrate the nutritional as well as medicinal significance of plants in the daily lives of villagers. Based on over a decade and half of research related to resilience and livelihood security, we present plant uses in …