Livelihood History and Humanitarian Knowledge in Protracted Food Crisis: A Case Study of Save the Children-UK in Wollo, Ethiopia

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the degree Master of Arts in Humanitarian Assistance at the Feinstein International Center

Registration, Opening Remarks, and Breakfast

Opening remarks by Dr. Heidi Gengenbach, Assistant Professor of History, with an introduction by Jon Green, HGSA Secretary

Introduction: Food and Sovereignty

This special issue had its origins in the spring and summer of 2020, a moment in which the stakes of food, gender and sovereignty were particularly visible. Pandemic-related shortages, shutdowns of restaurants, marketplaces and stores and sudden food insecurity for millions of people – all inescapably changed the daily experience of eating and provisioning. To get by, people created new networks to bypass the systems they had counted on in the past, sometimes retreating into their own DIY systems for producing food (e.g., home baking) and sometimes rediscovering local food systems. Food work was one significant source of the increased inequities of care and carework as lockdown made the tasks of cooking, provisioning and feeding that are traditionally considered ‘women's work’ more important, more visible in people's homes and more difficult. For many, these inequities, including barriers to food and precarity of supplies, were not new; they had been facts of life for a long time. In other, often wealthier, communities, the pandemic revealed and accelerated the impossibility of the status quo. It demanded new ways of thinking about food, gender and who has the right to exert authority over them

Food security and the contested visions of agrarian change in Africa

African countries are subject to competing visions of agricultural development. Efforts to “scale up” technocratic, market-based approaches focus on productivist indices (yields, income) rather than food access. Alternatives advocate agro-ecological practices, re-adoption of indigenous crops and state investment in agricultural extension. We introduce here six case studies on these contested visions from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Mozambique, Rwanda and Tanzania. Dominant agricultural development approaches neglect differences across class, geography and gender relations as well as marginalise many smallholders. Nevertheless, the everyday practices of small-scale food producers in Africa may strengthen their abilities to navigate and influence agrarian change

OSS4EVA: Using Open-Source Tools to Fulfill Digital Preservation Requirements

This paper builds on the findings of a workshop held at the 2015 International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES), entitled, “Using Open-Source Tools to Fulfill Digital Preservation Requirements” (OSS4PRES hereafter). This day-long workshop brought together participants from across the library and archives community, including practitioners, proprietary vendors, and representatives from open-source projects. The resulting conversations were surprisingly revealing: while OSS’ significance within the preservation landscape was made clear, participants noted that there are a number of roadblocks that discourage or altogether prevent its use in many organizations. Overcoming these challenges will be necessary to further widespread, sustainable OSS adoption within the digital preservation community. This article will mine the rich discussions that took place at OSS4PRES to (1) summarize the workshop’s key themes and major points of debate, (2) provide a comprehensive analysis of the opportunities, gaps, and challenges that using OSS entails at a philosophical, institutional, and individual level, and (3) offer a tangible set of recommendations for future work designed to broaden community engagement and enhance the sustainability of open source initiatives, drawing on both participants’ experience as well as additional research