An Evaluation of the COVID-19 Pandemic and Perceived Social Distancing Policies in Relation to Planning, Selecting, and Preparing Healthy Meals: An Observational Study in 38 Countries Worldwide

Objectives: To examine changes in planning, selecting, and preparing healthy foods in relation to personal factors (time, money, stress) and social distancing policies during the COVID-19 crisis. Methods: Using cross-sectional online surveys collected in 38 countries worldwide in April-June 2020 (N = 37,207, Mage 36.7 SD 14.8, 77% women), we compared changes in food literacy behaviors to changes in personal factors and social distancing policies, using hierarchical multiple regression analyses controlling for sociodemographic variables. Results: Increases in planning (4.7 SD 1.3, 4.9 SD 1.3), selecting (3.6 SD 1.7, 3.7 SD 1.7), and preparing (4.6 SD 1.2, 4.7 SD 1.3) healthy foods were found for women and men, and positively related to perceived time availability and stay-at-home policies. Psychological distress was a barrier for women, and an enabler for men. Financial stress was a barrier and enabler depending on various sociodemographic variables (all p < 0.01). Conclusion: Stay-at-home policies and feelings of having more time during COVID-19 seem to have improved food literacy. Stress and other social distancing policies relate to food literacy in more complex ways, highlighting the necessity of a health equity lens. Copyright 2021 De Backer, Teunissen, Cuykx, Decorte, Pabian, Gerritsen, Matthys, Al Sabbah, Van Royen and the Corona Cooking Survey Study Group.This research was funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (G047518N) and Flanders Innovation and Entrepreneurship (HBC.2018.0397). These funding sources had no role in the design of the study, the analysis and interpretation of the data or the writing of, nor the decision to publish the manuscript.Scopu

Deconstructing the stigma of ageing: the rise of the mature female influencers

This contribution investigates the phenomenon of mature female influencers, exploring how social media platforms have enabled so far marginalised social subjects not only to become produsers, but also to develop a leading role online, reshaping social representations and practices connected with the world of the older persons. The study addresses the following research questions: what kinds of content do mature influencers elaborate to produce and convey their messages? How do they change the structural relationship between women and fashion? We selected 18 mature influencers, and employed a qualitative approach based on online ethnography and analysis of social media content. The findings suggest that older influencers are challenging the conventional ways of imaging old age and reshaping the cultural meanings associated with ageing, thus contributing to innovation in the social representations and to the creation of alternative imagery of older women. In doing so, they are producing an important discourse for women, the older adults and the whole of society. However, initial attempts by fashion houses to colonise them are emerging

A Network of Yarns, A Network of Networks: Exploring the Evolution of the Urban Knitting Movement

The paper focuses on a specific form of activism \u2013 urban knitting \u2013 and analyses \u201cMettiamoci una pezza\u201d (\u201cLet\u2019s patch it\u201d), an initiative organized by a group of women activists from L\u2019Aquila, Italy, for the 10th anniversary of the earthquake, not only to draw public attention to the state of the city but also to other social and political issues. To analyze the organizational infrastructure of this movement, a qualitative content analysis of the videos produced by the craftivists was conducted, to which was added an analysis of the initiative\u2019s website. The findings show the main characteristics of this collective action, as well as the creation of a particular organizational infrastructure consisting of a network of networks, made possible thanks to digital media. This infrastructure enabled the achievements of outcomes that the organizations could not achieve independently, recomposing a widespread but fragmented activism, based not on a geographical proximity, but on common goals

Situational aware services in smart environments: socio-mobile and sensor data fusion for emergency response to disasters

Traditional situational awareness services in disaster management are mainly focused on the institutional warning response and not fully exploit the active participation of citizens involved. This paper presents an advanced system for emergency management (ASyEM) which fuses the potentiality offered by mobile social data and bottom-up communication with smart sensors. The proposed architecture model is organized into four different layers: (1) sensor, (2) local transmission, (3) network and (4) management. ASyEM is able to capture and aggregate two different kind of data: (a) user generated content produced by citizens during or immediately after the disaster and shared online through socio-mobile applications and (b) data acquired by smart sensors distributed on the environment (i.e., intelligent cameras, microphones, acoustic arrays, etc.). Data are selected, analysed, processed and integrated in order to increase the reliability and the efficiency of whole situational awareness services, localize the critical areas and obtain in this way some relevant information for emergency response and completion of search and rescue operations

Between the Square and the Net: Civic Engagement and Participation in a Post-Earthquake Movement

On the 6th, April 2009 at 3.32AM local time a 6.3Mw magnitude earthquake struck in L\u2019Aquila, a small city in the centre of Italy, causing the death of more than 300 people. This tragic event led to a prompt increase in the use of internet technologies by local citizens who utilized platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogs in order to reconstruct online the offline local public spaces of communication which had been damaged or destroyed by the quake. A year after the tragedy, to protest against the Italian state due to the problem of the debris that continued to be unremoved from the historical city centre, some citizens decided to fled into the streets with their wheelbarrows and autonomously remove the rubble: a new movement had emerged which would have later been labelled as \u201cthe people of the wheelbarrows\u201d. These people aim at involving the citizenship in the decisional processes regarding L\u2019Aquila reconstruction, in contrast to the government\u2019s bottom-up strategies. Moreover, they want to promote transparency in the management of the disaster funds and to re-open the militarized \u201cred zone\u201d created in the city centre. Finally, the movement wants to make the public opinion aware of the issue of the debris removal and the urgent need for the historical centre reconstruction. The aim of this paper is to analyse the internet related practices of the actors of \u201cthe people of the wheelbarrows\u201d. With the triangulation of semi-structured interviews, a content analysis of the movement\u2019s official Facebook group and a combination of online and offline ethnography, we try to answer to the following research questions: how do the people of the wheelbarrows interact with the internet to organize collective action? How is the movement participation articulated between online spaces and offline squares, meetings and events? Our findings highlight the importance of the local dimension and the interplay between the online and the offline dimensions (Bennett, 2003, 2005; Loader 2008). Moreover, the pivotal role played by Facebook in conjunction with a variety of other social platforms calls for an ecological approach in the study of social movements and the internet (Kavada, 2009; Mattoni, 2009; Padovani, 2010)