scholarly journals Covid-19 and Inequality: A Gender Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Frontoni

My paper examines some aspects of the Covid19 pandemic in Italy from a gender perspective. I intend to highlight some important inequalities in the management and cohabitation during the pandemic that risk being otherwise hidden in the public discourse. I will focus in particular on two circumstances: public decisions about the pandemic and work-care balancing. As regards the first profile, I will focus on the composition of the committees appointed by the government for the management of the crisis and the effects that this composition had on the way to deal with the pandemic in our country. With regard to the second profile, working environment is certainly where inequalities have emerged most clearly, albeit in a different way. First of all, there were women who had to work during the emergency and had problems reconciling work and care role. Secondly, women who could / had to work from home had to deal with the lack of a distinction between workspace and care duties. On this point, the Italian State has taken very different measures from those of other countries, for example the decision not to reopen schools, which has penalised and will continue to penalise women's work. In this perspective, the work will investigate what other measures have been or will be adopted since the so-called third phase.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janna Hastings

Mental health presents one of the defining public health challenges of our time. Proponents of different conceptions of what mental illness is wage war for the hearts and minds of patients, practitioners, policy-makers, and the public. Debate and fragmentation around the nature of the entities that feature in the mental health domain divide resources and reduce progress. The way mental health is publicly discussed in the media has tangible effects, in terms of stigma, access to healthcare and resources, and private expectations of recovery. This book explores in detail the sorts of statements that are made about mental health in the media and public reporting of scientific research, grounding them in the wider context of the theoretical frameworks, assumptions and metaphors that they draw from. The author shows how a holistic understanding of the way that different aspects of mental illness are interrelated can be developed from evidence-based interpretation of the latest research findings. She offers some ideas about corrective, integrative approaches to discussing mental health-related matters publicly that may reduce the opposition between conceptualisations while still aiming to reduce stigma, shame and blame. In particular, she emphasises that discourse in the media needs to be anchored to an overview of all the research results across the field and argues that this could be achieved using new technological infrastructures. The author provides an integrative account of what mental health is, together with an improved understanding of the factors driving the persistence of oppositional accounts in the public discourse. The book will be of benefit to researchers, practitioners and students in the domain of mental health.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (7) ◽  
pp. 2495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Yan ◽  
Fanghua Lu

With the new round of global nuclear issues, the populace’s emotion has been tensed and discomposure has been trigged off. To accurately understand the sense of nuclear safety & security for the Chinese public and ensure that the government makes reasonable decisions regarding nuclear issues, a special questionnaire and evaluation has been carried out. With the use of the principles for sociology of security, the methods of questionnaires and SPSS, a three-dimension assessment system, which consists of knowledge and experience, internal, and external trust, and the way of perception, was constructed. This research shows that the state of Chinese populace’s sense of nuclear safety & security is generally as follows: their knowledge of nuclear safety & security and personal experience are still on a low to intermediate level; In terms of trust, it shows that the populace has lack of adequate trust in nuclear safety & security of neighboring countries or regions, as well as Chinese government’s countermeasures; in the way of perception of nuclear safety & security, the populace has few options of related information sources and though the sources are less reliable. Also, the size of the audience of nuclear safety & security is far short of what is desired. Finally, the comprehensive assessment holds that the current overall sense of security for the Chinese populace is on a low to intermediate level (40.71%). This paper points out that China should strengthen the popularization of the security of nuclear science to enhance public security confidence, also, further, more detailed and specific safeguarding measures regarding nuclear safety & security should be made to promote the development of nuclear safety & security affairs.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor G Gates ◽  
Margery C Saunders

Workers who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ)-identified have always been a part of the workplace in the United States, yet there has been a lack of awareness about how to advocate for the needs of these people. This lack of awareness was challenged by Congresswoman Bella Abzug. Abzug’s campaign for creating an equal working environment for sexual minorities initiated gradual changes in the public discourse concerning workplace and other broad equality measures for these communities. To frame these gradual transformations within a historical context, we use Lewin’s force field analysis framework to examine the change efforts of Abzug. Abzug had beginning success in thawing the status quo yet her visions for equality for LGBTQ people have yet to be realized. Using Abzug’s social action as an example, this article concludes that allies must continue to challenge societal oppression, power, and privilege and to demand civil rights protections for LGBTQ individuals.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Moss

This final chapter returns to Ford, Dagenham to analyse the second strike that was organised by female sewing-machinists for skill recognition in the winter of 1984-1985. Whilst the 1968 strike analysed in chapter 2 was optimistically hailed as a turning point symbolising a new era of gender equality, the sewing-machinists were dissatisfied because the skilled nature of their work was not recognised. For the women at Ford, the underlying grading grievance and the sense of injustice that led to the 1968 dispute continued to shape their experiences of work and trade unionism for the next 17 years. This dispute marks an appropriate place to begin to draw some broader conclusions about women’s experiences of workplace activism between 1968 and 1985. The Ford sewing-machinists’ eventual success in winning their grading intimates a transition had occurred in the way women’s work was valued in the intervening 17 years between the strikes – at least within the Ford factory. Drawing upon contemporary representations of the dispute and interviews with women involved, this final chapter considers whether the women themselves believed the strike represented a change in attitudes towards female workers.


2001 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriana Chiroleu ◽  
Osvaldo Iazzetta ◽  
Claudia Voras ◽  
Claudio Diaz

Although university autonomy was apparently protected during Carlos Menem's government (1989-1999), actually it was gradually undergoing substantial changes. "Intrusive" devices had been prepared by the executive power, thus causing the restriction of its objectives. This kind of state participation was less explicit than in the past, being now associated with the establishment of a system of "punishment and reward," in which financing is subordinated to "performance," evaluated according to the parameters of multilateral credit organizations . In this work, we analyse the way in which this conflict took place under Menem's government, contrasting the meanings given to the idea of autonomy by the government and by the public institution; attentin focuses on the case of the National University of Rosario.


10.2196/23957 ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. e23957
Author(s):  
Chengda Zheng ◽  
Jia Xue ◽  
Yumin Sun ◽  
Tingshao Zhu

Background During the COVID-19 pandemic in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau provided updates on the novel coronavirus and the government’s responses to the pandemic in his daily briefings from March 13 to May 22, 2020, delivered on the official Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) YouTube channel. Objective The aim of this study was to examine comments on Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefings by YouTube users and track these comments to extract the changing dynamics of the opinions and concerns of the public over time. Methods We used machine learning techniques to longitudinally analyze a total of 46,732 English YouTube comments that were retrieved from 57 videos of Prime Minister Trudeau’s COVID-19 daily briefings from March 13 to May 22, 2020. A natural language processing model, latent Dirichlet allocation, was used to choose salient topics among the sampled comments for each of the 57 videos. Thematic analysis was used to classify and summarize these salient topics into different prominent themes. Results We found 11 prominent themes, including strict border measures, public responses to Prime Minister Trudeau’s policies, essential work and frontline workers, individuals’ financial challenges, rental and mortgage subsidies, quarantine, government financial aid for enterprises and individuals, personal protective equipment, Canada and China’s relationship, vaccines, and reopening. Conclusions This study is the first to longitudinally investigate public discourse and concerns related to Prime Minister Trudeau’s daily COVID-19 briefings in Canada. This study contributes to establishing a real-time feedback loop between the public and public health officials on social media. Hearing and reacting to real concerns from the public can enhance trust between the government and the public to prepare for future health emergencies.


Author(s):  
Sarah Arnold ◽  
Anne O'Brien

The scholarship collected in this issue of Alphaville represents a selection of the research that was to be presented at the 2020 Doing Women’s Film & Television History conference, which was one of the many events cancelled as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic itself greatly impeded academic life and our capacity to carry out and share research among colleagues, students and the public. Covid-19 was even more problematic for women, who shouldered a disproportionate care burden throughout the pandemic. Therefore, we are particularly delighted to be able to present an issue that addresses a number of topics and themes related to the study of women in film and television, including, but not limited to, the production and use of archival collections for the study of women’s film and television histories; the foregrounding of women in Irish film and television histories; women’s productions and representation in films of the Middle East; representations of sex and sexuality in television drama; and women’s work and labour in film and television. The breadth of the themes covered here is indicative of the many ways in which scholars seek to produce, describe and uncover the histories and practices of women in these media. They suggest opportunities for drawing attention to women’s work, whether that is labouring in the film and television industries or the work that women’s images are put to do on screen. Collectively, the articles contained in this issue point to a multitude of opportunities for doing and producing women’s film and television histories, either as they occurred in the past or as they materialise in the present. They offer correctives to absences and marginalisation in production histories, in archiving or preservation, and in representation.


Author(s):  
Jana Kujundžić

This paper will focus on sexual violence and new forms of religious traditionalism emerging in the Croatian political context and their engagement with the term gender. Critical Discourse Analysis as a methodological framework will be used to investigate the debates surrounding the ratification of the Istanbul Convention (Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence) in 2018 in Croatia. Religious conservative organisations started to frequently utilize the term “gender ideology” to created fear, confusion and moral panic in the public discourse in connection to the ratification. According to their interpretations, “gender ideology” in the Istanbul convention was smuggled in to destroy the traditional Croatian Catholic heterosexual family by enabling children to choose their own gender. Croatia has undergone significant changes since the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s dismissing its socialist legacy with the support of the Catholic Church and its staunch anti-communist rhetoric which seeks to undo any progress in terms of gender equality achieved during socialism. Researching sexual violence from the intersectional feminist framework poses a challenge in a climate where the conservative discourse has highjacked any discussion of sexual violence in the public sphere by contesting the term gender itself and making it a questioned category of social analysis. Even though Croatia has ratified the Istanbul Convention in April 2018, the government has issued alongside an “interpretative statement” further legitimizing the term “gender ideology.”


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