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Gender as unequal power relations intersects with global environmental change threatening agriculture-based livelihoods, including land degradation, increasing climate variability, and invasive alien plants. Commonly overlooked, invasive alien plants may have gendered impacts on everyday life that disproportionately affect the less powerful. Drawing on experiences of smallholder farmers in Ethiopia’s Oromia region with an invasive, transboundary weed, Parthenium hysterophorus L., this paper illustrates how environmental change interacts with pre-existing vulnerabilities to shape individual and household-level impacts and responses. We applied a feminist perspective in livelihoods and environmental change research and praxis to explore the intersection of gendered livelihoods and parthenium management in spaces of everyday life. While invasive plants, including parthenium, may be easily perceptible in the field, understanding impacts on livelihoods requires consideration of women’s and men’s roles and responsibilities within the broader household compound as well as intra-household decision-making. Parthenium can be harmful to environmental, animal, and human health, but unduly impacts women’s labor, spaces, and assets, including cows whose milk may be tainted by grazing in parthenium-infested fields. We demonstrate the importance of considering women’s social networks and so-called reproductive space and labor to understand gendered and place-based inequities of climate change. This study reveals intimate connections between environmental stressors and gendered livelihoods. Our findings demonstrate how inequalities can be reinforced by new forms of vulnerability, with response options socially differentiated. We argue that a feminist livelihood lens helps bridge the global scale of environmental change with local scales of gendered livelihood adaptation embedded within broader socio-environmental change.

Mobile phones have been heralded by many as promising new tools to empower women throughout the Global South. However, some have asserted that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) may serve to amplify disparities between more powerful and less powerful people. Few studies have examined which women stand to benefit and under what conditions. This study seeks to better understand the relationships between mobile phones and women’s empowerment by examining diverse women’s experiences within Maasai agro-pastoralist communities in northern Tanzania. Specifically, we ask three guiding questions: (1) How do Maasai women access and use phones? (2) What processes of empowerment do phones support or undermine? and (3) How are these processes embedded in diverse social relations? To address these questions, we use a framework that integrates a Social Relations Approach with a modified version of the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach. Our team conducted semi-structured and individual-stakeholder interviews with Maasai women in June-July, 2018 to learn their perspectives on phones, social-relations and multiple aspects of empowerment. We analyzed the content of these interviews using deductive and inductive qualitative strategies. These efforts yield multiple findings: (1) women’s access to phones is fluid; (2) multiple pathways to empowerment and disempowerment exist; (3) phones reinforce inequalities; (4) women’s identities are intersectional; and (5) women’s networks remain homogenous. Taken together, this approach and these insights provide a more conservative account of the benefits of mobile phones than many studies and also an important technology-empowerment narrative for development scholars and practitioners.

There is growing evidence to suggest that a substantial number of college and university students in the United States grapple with food insecurity during their studies. One of the most comprehensive surveys on this issue was conducted by The Hope Center with 33 participating four-year institutions. They estimated that 41% of students had low or very low food security (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2019). A review of food security studies by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) (2018) found similar results and that few students who qualified for food assistance were aware of federal food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). In response to the increasing concern over students’ access to food, this study aims to document food security at Virginia Tech. The study was designed with two parallel goals: to contribute to the national conversation on food access and security amongst higher education students; and to inform a strategic response through data-informed programs and policies at Virginia Tech. The first phase of the study was conducted between Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 and consisted of semi-structured key informant interviews. The second phase was conducted between December 2018 and January 2019 and consisted of an anonymous survey distributed to 32,242 students (27,421 undergraduate and 4,821 graduate) located in Blacksburg. A total of 2,441 (8.9%) undergraduate and 589 (12.2%) graduate students completed the entire survey (for a combined response rate of 9.4%). This study finds that 29% (±3.8%) of undergraduate and 35% (±7%) of graduate students were classified as having low or very low food security based on the USDA food security instrument. These findings are comparable with The Hope Center study (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2019). Students with low/very low food security status were more likely to be Hispanic/Latino or Black/African American, be receiving a Pell grant or financing their education through sources that

There is growing evidence to suggest that a substantial number of college and university students in the United States grapple with food insecurity during their studies. One of the most comprehensive surveys on this issue was conducted by The Hope Center with 33 participating four-year institutions. They estimated that 41% of students had low or very low food security (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2019). A review of food security studies by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) (2018) found similar results and that few students who qualified for food assistance were aware of federal food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). In response to the increasing concern over students’ access to food, this study aims to document food security at Virginia Tech. The study was designed with two parallel goals: to contribute to the national conversation on food access and security amongst higher education students; and to inform a strategic response through data-informed programs and policies at Virginia Tech. The first phase of the study was conducted between Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 and consisted of semi-structured key informant interviews. The second phase was conducted between December 2018 and January 2019 and consisted of an anonymous survey distributed to 32,242 students (27,421 undergraduate and 4,821 graduate) located in Blacksburg. A total of 2,441 (8.9%) undergraduate and 589 (12.2%) graduate students completed the entire survey (for a combined response rate of 9.4%). This study finds that 29% (±3.8%) of undergraduate and 35% (±7%) of graduate students were classified as having low or very low food security based on the USDA food security instrument. These findings are comparable with The Hope Center study (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2019). Students with low/very low food security status were more likely to be Hispanic/Latino or Black/African American, be receiving a Pell grant or financing their education through sources that

The WGD program at CIRED has conducted a monthly discussion series for over a decade. Students, faculty, staff and members of the community are encouraged to attend the discussions and bring their ideas and questions. The series offers an opportunity for scholars and development practitioners to share their research and knowledge surrounding gender and international development with the Virginia Tech community and beyond.