Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Food security is under focused issue in Sudan as a whole and AlQadarif State is not apart from that. According to the integrated food security phases classification (IPC) report April (2015), about 60% of the population suffering from food insecurity in the State. This problem needs to be solved by clear and sound policies and strategies.  The main objective of this study is to investigate and evaluate the Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) policies and strategies in the State. To achieve this objective secondary data such as annual reports, policy documents were collected from all key line institutions and primary data were collected by the mean of a questionnaire the main results of this research are that: there were no clear food security and nutrition policy documents for the key line institutions in the State.  Also, there was a gap between the policymakers at the State level and the locality level. 42% of the policymakers at the locality level did not aware of the existence of the FSN body in the State. About 94% of the policymakers in the localities believed that the Chamber of Zakat plays a very important role in helping at FSN situations. About 92% of policymakers in the state said that finance is not sufficient. The majority of the localities policymakers, 94%, do not have any (FSN) database in their localities. Finally, the main recommendation of this study is to build a food security and nutrition policy/strategy putting the conservation of the natural resources in consideration.

This report analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on journalistic work in Mexico. Through a non-probabilistic survey with N=472 journalists, we examine: the roles that journalists consider important in a pandemic context; the actors, sources, and topics that they followed and covered more frequently; their evaluation of various actors’ informational strategies and handling of the pandemics; and the areas that require the most urgent journalistic training. Moreover, the study explores the impact of the pandemic on journalists’ work (routines and exposure to risky assignments), employment (layoffs and cuts), health (COVID-19 infections) and welfare and emotional well-being (exhaustion, stress, anxiety, anguish, frustration). We found that functions associated with the service and civic journalistic roles received the greatest support. With respect to coverage, most respondents used and followed up on official sources and institutional actors, especially local government officers. Journalists have not only been affected by COVID-19, layoffs, and the degradation of their working conditions, but they are more overloaded, tired, stressed, and anxious about their future. Many had to overcome logistical difficulties and highly risky assignments for their health in conditions of little training and minimal security protocols implemented by their media organizations.

Using framing theory in an empirical case study approach, this article analyses the kind of characterization and framing that the Mexican media made of lobbying around the front labeling policy for food and beverages or NOM-051. Although there is some idea of how the media portrays both this controversial issue and those who practices it more intensely, there is not enough research to describe and explain how interest groups politics is presented to the audiences in Mexico. Thus, the qualitative findings of this exploratory article are contributions to the study of lobbying and interest group politics from a political communication perspective, discovering that this phenomenon is not only incompletely characterized in the news, but also that the frameworks employed by the media highlights conflict and scandal over many positive aspects the organized representation of different interests offers. Thus, this paper is the beginning of a research agenda that seeks to understand not only the framing of the media on lobbying, but also to investigate the perception of public opinion in this regard and what its impacts are for democracy.

In crises such as COVID-19, fast and effective communication is required, for this reason the presidents at the beginning of the pandemic used all possible means to inform and involve citizens in the knowledge and control of the health crisis. The objective of this mixed research (content analysis and statistics) was to compare the impact on user interaction and comments related to health, economy, and politics, based on tweets about COVID- 19 of the Presidents of Mexico, Spain and the United States issued between March 15th and April 15th, 2020. All the tweets from the presidents (213) and a convenience sample of 1% of the comments (4,345) were analyzed. Among the findings of the interaction: more favorites in Mexico (66.1%) and Spain (55.7%), more retweets in the United States (72.5%), polarized comments (positive and negative) in Mexico and Spain towards politics, comments in the United States positive towards economics and negative towards politics. Regarding the language of the presidents, in Spain and Mexico it was more related to satisfying the needs of the population; while in America with medical supplies, ventilators, and helping other countries.

The viralization of deliberately false content has a negative impact on the pillars of democracy and represents an increasing problem for today's societies. These information disorders increased their presence during the COVID-19 health crisis, which justifies the critical observation we propose. This study analyzes forty-eight verification platforms that publish their content in Spanish in order to learn about the procedures and tools they put into practice to deal with disinformation and fake news. A content analysis of each website was carried out and the data was triangulated with surveys sent to people responsible for fact-checking initiatives in Latin America and Spain. The results indicate that the fight against misinformation occurs predominantly in the digital territory and is often uneven. However, it is clear from the responses of those surveyed that technological tools are also essential allies in combating the infodemic.

Previous studies on the impact of technological innovation in journalism have tended not to look deeply enough into the adaptation of journalists to the use of technology, which has limited the analysis of what this occupational change implies for working conditions. This research examines the implications of technological innovation in journalistic work based on the perceptions and experiences of Bolivian journalists regarding the use of WhatsApp in newsgathering. Under a qualitative methodology, we emphasize the role of the organizational factor and that of professional agency in innovation. The findings suggest that the routine inclusion of this messaging platform in already standardized newsgathering practices leads to a re-standardization of the work. In these terms, innovation involves individual and collective adaptation processes in which the use of WhatsApp is oriented to deal with a competitive work environment and responds to organizational demands, individual motivations, and contextual pressures. Finally, the logic of connectivity behind the mobile chat platform puts journalists in a relationship of dependence with technology that makes their work and personal lives precarious.

This proposal constitutes a theoretical approach to resistances in the journalistic field. Based on a theoretical and conceptual review, it explores to what extent the postulates of the American political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott on everyday resistance could serve as a starting point and support an investigation on the resistance of journalists in their production, practices, and routines. The capacity to resist can be considered an inherent characteristic of the individual, so that journalists can also oppose, resist, confront, face, evade, and question the power relations or situations of conflict that are generated in their daily and working spaces. This study argues that resistances in the journalistic field have points in common with Scott's notions of everyday resistances, given that journalists' resistances can very rarely occur in terms of "insurrection" or in an open and declared manner, but rather as everyday micro resistances, daily, subtle, and covert behaviors and attitudes. In line with this, it is proposed to study journalists' daily resistances from two dimensions: disguised and hidden forms of discourse and forms of hidden discourse as a practice.

In the last decade, video games as a field of study have gained more relevance, resulting in the recognition by other fields of study that now include them as an extension of their own research, adding new challenges and opportunities to the way these fields are understood. While there has been an increase in the production and study of video games in international studies disciplines, such as international development and global health, little research has been done on their potential as tools for public diplomacy. Through qualitative methods, this theoretical analysis explores the use of video games for conflict resolution as part of a public diplomacy strategy. Based on the imagined intergroup contact theory, it is argued that video games act as catalysts for the creation of a virtual third space where intergroup relation can promote the reduction of negative prejudices and the increase of empathy, necessary elements for public diplomacy programs.

The purpose of this paper is to problematize, from the theoretical elements offered by Pierre Bourdieu, the so-called neutral Spanish of Latin American dubbing, with the purpose of placing it as a defining symbolic phenomenon of a specific audiovisual consumption reality, which gestation dates from the early years of the Cold War and remains to this day. Far from thinking about neutrality in relation to the unity of the Spanish language, this work identifies neutral Spanish as a variant where the accent of central Mexico predominates and as an originally American strategy guided by the interests of the film industry. Based on this, the creation of this Spanish is considered a violent process of imposition within the framework of a symbolic dispute between agents such as production companies, dubbing companies, consumers, etc. Finally, the article analyzes the geopolitical, economical, and cultural interests that neutral Spanish hides, in an attempt to point out the main beneficiaries of its use.

Review of Emiliano Treté (2020). Activismo Mediático Híbrido. Ecologías, Imaginarios, Algoritmo. FES Comunicación.