Making sense of WIC: Narratives from the margin
Abstract
Poverty is a social and economic structure that shapes the livelihood of millions of United States citizens. Despite the literature pointing to the negative influence of poverty on the health of the poor, the narratives of the people living poverty on day-to-day basis remained absent from the public sphere. This project attended to the articulations of the poor as they situated their health in the backdrop of their economic situation. I concentrated on understanding the challenges and opportunities the unprivileged clients of The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) face as they navigate through poverty structures and the lack of accessibility to health services. Marginalized by the society, WIC clients were dropped from WIC discourse and policy circles. Grounded in the culture-centered approach, this study seeks to foreground the voices of the WIC clients in the policy-making discourse through active creation of opportunities for dialogue that bring to the forefront the untold stories of their marginalization and resistance. Using in-depth interviews, ethnographic observation, archival review and journal keeping for data, I proposed ways drawn from these narratives to influence policy making and provision of health services to the poor. WIC clients interrogated their nutritionally-at-risk lives, examined the processes and the services of WIC, and shared strategies to circumvent the delimiting structures of their poverty. The culture-centered approach provided the theoretical and practical framework to highlight the power structures that confined the life of the marginalized.^
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Mohan J. Dutta, Purdue University.
Subject Area
Speech Communication|Health Sciences, General|Sociology, Public and Social Welfare|Health Sciences, Health Care Management
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