Who should feed hungry families during crisis? Moral claims about hunger on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic

How do crisis conditions affect longstanding societal narratives about hunger? This paper examines how hunger was framed in public discourse during an early period in the COVID-19 crisis to mobilize attention and make moral claims on others to alleviate it. It does so through a discourse analysis of...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Agriculture and human values 2022-12, Vol.39 (4), p.1437-1449
Main Author: Oleschuk, Merin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Agricultural Economics
Agricultural Ethics
Civil society
Companies
Coronaviruses
COVID-19
Crises
Culture
Development Studies
Discourse analysis
Education
English language
Environmental Sociology
Humanities and Social Sciences
Hunger
Morality
multidisciplinary
Narratives
Pandemics
Philosophy
Politics
Racism
Science
Sustainable Development
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Summary:How do crisis conditions affect longstanding societal narratives about hunger? This paper examines how hunger was framed in public discourse during an early period in the COVID-19 crisis to mobilize attention and make moral claims on others to alleviate it. It does so through a discourse analysis of 1023 U.S.-based English-language posts dedicated to hunger on Twitter during four months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis finds that Twitter users chiefly adopted hunger as a political tool to make moral claims on the state rather than individuals, civil society organizations, or corporations; however, hunger was deployed to defend widely diverse political agendas ranging from progressive support for SNAP entitlements to conservative claims reinforcing anti-lockdown and racist “America First” sentiments. Theoretically, the paper contributes to understanding how culture and morality operate in times of crisis. It demonstrates how culture can be deployed in crisis to reinforce longstanding ideological commitments at the same time that it organizes political imaginations in new ways. The result, in this case, is that longstanding cultural narratives about hunger were used to defend dissimilar, and in some ways contradictory, political ends. Practically, the paper demonstrates how moralized calls to alleviate hunger are vulnerable to political manipulation and used to further conflicting political goals, yet may also offer opportunities to leverage support for bolstered state investments in food assistance during times of crisis.
ISSN:0889-048X
1572-8366
DOI:10.1007/s10460-022-10333-2