PoliBlog

Results of a community-based participatory research project on farm-to-school connections in the Holyoke public schools by UMass Professor Krista Harper (anthropology and CPPA), CPPA alumna Catherine Sands (G ’08), and undergraduate anthropology major Molly Totman (’10) will be presented at Nuestras Raíces’ and the Holyoke Food and Fitness Policy Council’s “Farm to School FEEST!” at the Holyoke Health Center on Tuesday, December 14th from 5pm to 7pm. The event is open to all community members.

Nuestras Raíces youth have been working with Dr. Harper on a Photovoice project, with support of Sands, Executive Director of Fertile Ground, documenting how fresh produce grown at Holyoke’s Nuestras Raíces Farm is served at lunch in the Holyoke Public School system. Totman also carried out participatory action research with the youth group as part of this fall’s project. All of the season’s work will be celebrated by sharing a youth-prepared healthy meal and presenting the photographs documenting the farm to school process.

Farm to School connects schools (K-12) and local farms with the objectives of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias, improving student nutrition, providing agriculture, health and nutrition education opportunities, and supporting local and regional farmers. This past season La Finca, the Nuestras Raices Farm, provided the school system with 580lbs. of tomatoes, 100 heads of lettuce, and 50lbs of green peppers.

According to the Bach Harrison “2009 Prevention Needs Assessment Survey Report for the Holyoke District”, 75% of Holyoke students do not consume enough vegetables on a weekly basis for good nutrition. Students who are dependent on school lunch eat 5 out of 21 meals at school and those who also participate in breakfast programs consume almost half of their weekly meals at school.

FEEST stands for “Food Empowerment Education Sustainability Team,” a nationwide youth-led community potluck initiative where communities come together to prepare a delicious and healthy meal and then eat together family-style while learning more about healthy, sustainable food systems. The Nuestras Raices youth program has led local FEEST efforts since summer 2010.

The goal of the event is to gain support from community members to ask for fresher and healthier school food. The youth will be preparing healthy food with fresh produce for attendees to try.

-About NUESTRAS RAICES
Nuestras Raíces is a grass-roots organization that promotes economic, human and community development in Holyoke, Massachusetts through projects relating to food, agriculture, and the environment. The organization provides a safe place where the youth get all the help and training they need to succeed in their goals. Positive encouragement and guidance allows them to feel like they can and will succeed in life.

Jane Fountain, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy and Director of the National Center for Digital Government, gave the keynote address at the national electronic government conference, eFörtvaltings Dargna 2010 (eGovernment Days 2010), in Stockholm, Sweden on November 16. Her address, “Government 2.0: Potential and Challenges,” explored the potential for Internet and emerging technologies to transform government processes and relations.

eGovernment Days brought together academic researchers, government officials, and business leaders to discuss the future of Internet and governance in Sweden. Fountain also was invited to present the “diamond award,” a prestigious, national award given to an outstanding example of innovation in Swedish government, at the conclusion of the conference.

While in Sweden, Professor Fountain also presented a lecture at VINNOVA, the Swedish Government counterpart to the United States National Science Foundation, and briefed the Swedish e-Government Research Network, a national group of academic researchers whose focus is the Internet and governance, on her current research.

In addition to her international addresses at eGovernment Days and VINNOVA, Fountain was a keynote speaker at the mLife conference in Brighton, England in October, and the Portugal Tecnologico 2010 conference in Lisbon, Portugal September. These lectures built on her current research programs through the National Center for Digital Government, which is based at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

On Friday, December 3rd, Martha Fuentes-Bautista, assistant professor of communication and public policy, will present current research on “Cyberpopulism in Venezuela: ‘Media war’ or ‘radical democracy’ online?” The brown-bag lecture is organized by the National Center for Digital Government and will take place at 12 p.m. in the 3rd floor conference room in Gordon Hall.

According to Fuentes-Bautista, “most research on political implications of Internet for democracy focuses on how the adoption and use of web tools (i.e. blogs) for political advocacy or e-government contribute to deliberative consensus or polarization in Western liberal democracies.” Yet, the critical question from a broader theory of media democracy is how diverse citizens are able to participate and be heard in these spaces. Her presentation will introduce a larger project that interrogates how social media tools have been used by the state, organized popular actors, and citizens in Venezuela, a country that in the last decade has embarked in a democratic but highly contentious transition towards a radical popular democracy. Her project examines the rationale behind, and actual forms of citizen participation enabled by these online projects.

The overall project looks at (1) state and citizens discourses in policy debates between 2009 and 2010 about the potential regulation of social media tools; (2) online communication practices and citizen participation in blogs produced by the populist movement, the state, opposition and alternative groups; and (3) media activists’ understandings about the democratic and participatory affordances of online communications. “Cyber-populism” or the symbolic construction of networked communications as a means to strengthen direct, popular governance and participation is proposed as a framework to understand how the state and the popular movement that supports it negotiate their relationship through these policies and initiatives. Preliminary analysis of policy debates on social media use and regulation reveals the symbolic and discursive production of social media as sites of radical democratic governance, and as a “new front” in Venezuela’s “media wars” for the construction of a new Bolivarian hegemony as alternative to capitalism. In these debates, the state and popular movement actors combine discourses on popular communicational sovereignty, administrative efficiencies and counter-hegemonic conflict to promote e-government applications of social media. I discuss the implications of these findings for the promotion of “centralized modes” of citizen participation, and the increasing fractures of Venezuelan public sphere(s).

Fuentes-Bautista conducts research on the social and policy implications of information and communication technologies (ICTs) with a particular focus on how ICTs exacerbate or alleviate social inequalities. She also has investigated the institutional contexts of ICT adoption and use in Latin America and the U.S. Publications include “Reconfiguring Public Internet Access in Austin, TX: WiFi’s Promise and Broadband Divides” (Government Information Quarterly). As a recipient of a recent Faculty Research/Healey Endowment grant, she is collecting data and conducting analysis concerning the role played by local broadband interventions on the ability of Western Massachusetts communities to expand universal service. Her findings will inform state and federal programs charged with advancing broadband coverage.