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"My Girls: The Power of Friendship in a Poor Neighborhood" by Jasmin Sandelson is an ethnographic study that follows a group of teenage women in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they navigate high school. The young women, most of whom are Black and either immigrants or daughters of immigrants, live in public housing and face the challenges of race, immigrant status, and poverty. The book explores the role of friendships in providing social and material support for these young women, challenging the notion that teenage peer groups are inherently dangerous. It also examines the positive impact of social media on their self-confidence and solidarity, although the study was conducted before the rise of platforms like Instagram and TikTok. The book highlights the need for college programs and policies that address the social health of students of color, as the transition to college can be particularly challenging for marginalized youth. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how gendered access to digital capital—in the form of the social and economic resources needed to own and use a mobile phone—is connected to key adult milestones, such as securing employment and engaging in romantic relationships. Descriptive statistical analysis of 11,030 young people aged 15–24 in Rakai, Uganda indicated that men were more likely to own mobile phones than women. Analysis of qualitative interviews with young people (N = 31) and ethnographic participant observations among young people (N = 24) add nuance and depth to the observed gender difference. We go beyond a 'categorical' approach to gender (i.e. comparing rates between men and women) to examine how access to digital capital is gendered both for men and for women. Mobile phone ownership both reproduces and destabilises gendered social organisation in ways that have implications for economic opportunities, social connections, HIV risk and overall health and well-being. Young men had greater access to the benefits of mobile phone ownership, whereas young women's access to those benefits was impeded by covert and overt gendered mechanisms of control that limited access to digital capital. Findings suggest that mhealth initiatives, increasingly deployed to reach under-resourced populations, must take into account gendered access to digital capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In some Ugandan fishing communities, almost half the population lives with HIV. Researchers designate these communities "HIV hotspots" and attribute disproportionate disease burdens to "sex-for-fish" relationships endemic to the lakeshores. In this article, we trace the emergence of Uganda's HIV hotspots to structural adjustment. We show how global economic policies negotiated in the 1990s precipitated the collapse of Uganda's coffee sector, causing mass economic dislocation among women workers, who migrated to the lake. There, they entered overt forms of sex work or marriages they may have otherwise avoided, intimate economic arrangements that helped to "engineer the spread of HIV," as one respondent recounted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]