Philippine E-Journals

A Positioning Theory Inquiry: A Fight Against Demonization of Community Pantries

Bernadeth Ballesteros | Darwin Diola | Leo Eusantos | Ann Maribel Hapin | Billy Joel Ramos | Christoper F Sasot

Discipline: Education

 

Abstract:

The necessity of having community pantries in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a cause of political, social, and public health controversy with issues ranging from the government inaction and inadequacy of governmental response in the pandemic. Utilizing the theoretical lens of positioning theory qualitative design, specifically content analysis, aimed to investigate how the public online community builds meaning of the community pantry through SocMed posts, online news comments, editorial/opinion articles from a 20000-word corpus, and 321 words analyzed. Results revealed that the most prevalent discourse on SocMed users positioned the community pantries as a positive response to mitigate the COVID-19 Pandemic, especially among the most vulnerable communities. Most of the corpus from online and editorial/opinion articles shed light that the community pantry sees as social responsibilities parley than vested propaganda. However, discourses from the digital space on pantry organizers underwent red-tagging by government forces and were bombarded with death threats. Propositioned that the netizens from the digital platforms, the government is incapable of addressing the needs of the impoverished sector during the pandemic in which community pantries continue to emerge. To this effect, the community pantries draw a complementary opposite force on cyberspace, some negative comments were directly associated with the community pantries to rebellion and anti-government propaganda. However, the community pantries are not meant to take the place of the government role or to meet citizens' long-term needs.