Women, Infants, and Children (WIC): Narratives from the margin

• In Event: Communication Activism Scholarship: Examples from Emerging Scholars

Abstract

One in four children under the age of 6 in the United States lives in poverty (Meyers, Gornick, & Peck, 2001). Research on poverty also reveals that women in the United States face a greater risk of poverty than do men, which is especially true for mothers with young children. The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program is one of the three-largest federal food support programs in the United States, benefiting (in 2008) around 9 million nutritionally at-risk women and children. WIC, a federally funded, state-run program, provides supplemental nutritious foods, nutrition education, health screening and referrals, and other social services to low-income pregnant women, postpartum women, infants, and children (WIC, 2008; USDA, 2006). Although WIC’s program has been studied and evaluated extensively by public health practitioners, nutrition groups, and biomedical researchers, the voices of WIC clients remain absent in scholarly discourse and policy circles. WIC clients have been systematically treated as subjects of WIC intervention program, with their voices rendered silent by the dominant system that limits itself to the voices of “knowledgeable” experts. This absence calls for participatory methods as opposed to the dominant top-down approach in existing scholarship on WIC. Grounded in a culture-centered approach (Dutta, 2008), this study foregrounds the voices of the WIC clients through active creation of opportunities for dialogue that bring to the forefront the untold stories of marginalized WIC clients as they make sense of the WIC program in the context of their nutritionally at-risk lives. The study utilizes multiple data-collection methods, including interviews conducted with WIC clients and WIC staff, archival review, observation of WIC sessions, and journal keeping by clients. By studying the WIC intervention program from a marginalized perspective, I aim to contribute to theorizing on health campaigns and policy-making processes that involve people at the margins.

Author

• Nadine Yehya, Purdue University