The Global Challenges week, from Sept. 26-30, brings together Ohio University students, faculty, staff, and community members who share an academic interest in the major global challenges of today and tomorrow. This week-long event focuses on global hunger, climate change, health crises, and human disasters which can only be addressed through the pooling and sharing of knowledge across disciplines.
Most of the events can be viewed live or following the event on A&S TV.
- Monday, Sept. 26 – Steve Scanlan (Sociology) on “The Global Hunger Crisis: Food Poverty and Its Complexities in a World of Plenty,” 4-5 p.m. at Alden 319.
- Watch on A&S TV.
The Global Hunger Crisis: Food Poverty and Its Complexities in a World of Plenty
Abstract: Hunger and food insecurity have been a persistent global challenge. Reflecting the intersection of multiple issues including conflict and war, environmental considerations, globalization, politics, political economy, and population dynamics to name a few. However, running through these complex dimensions is inequality in its many forms, culminating in the notion of “food poverty” that reflects the barriers to access people experience with regard to food in a world of plenty. This research explores these complexities, arguing that although the contemporary world produces more food per capita than ever in human history (although with climatic and ecological consequences!), equitable distribution and the classic notion of an “entitlement to food” pioneered by economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen have failed to come to fruition. Thus, the nearly 900 million global citizens—mostly in less industrialized societies but in our own backyard as well—who go to bed hungry every night do so at the whim of food prices and global markets, the pervasiveness of military famines, the burdens of population-ecology, and the affliction of poverty and inequality in a world that has failed to agree to and enforce the notion of food as a human right.
Dr. Steve Scanlan
Biography: Scanlan is an Associate Professor of Sociology. His research interests include the intersections of poverty and inequality with hunger and food insecurity, gender and development, protest and social change, and environmental justice. He has published numerous articles in venues such as American Sociological Review, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, International Journal of Agriculture and Food, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and World Development among others in addition to selections in multiple books, most recently a chapter in Development in Crisis: Threats to Human Well-being in the Global South and Global North. He teaches Social Inequality and Social Change; the Sociology of Poverty; Environmental Sociology; and a capstone in Environmental Justice and Inequality in addition to directing a study abroad program in Ireland: Food Hunger and Inequality, the Great Irish Famine in Contemporary Perspective.
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