This research strives to tell a new story regarding the social production of health by focusing on the relations of power influencing food access and related health conditions. This new story begins by challenging existing tools used to understand the publics health and offers a new theory-methods package, materialist praxis, as means for activating population health perspectives and for materializing praxis-oriented research. I then apply a materialist praxis research approach to transform three Boys and Girls Clubs in Nashville, Tennessee from youth-serving organizations to farmers markets. This participatory, situated, reflective, and materialized research process provided an opportunity for children, youth, and adults to author a discourse of resistance and possibility with respect to pressing health inequities such as obesity and food insecurity. Through performances in and to space, this research also provided opportunities for uncovering the spatially, temporally, and socially constructed boundaries influencing food access. These boundaries combine to make real, fresh, and good foods foods considered to be healthier than and superior to foods described as bad, rotten, and junk inaccessible to many people residing in socially marginalized locations. Data analysis also depicted a nuanced understanding of food access by focusing on the financial and time costs influencing access. The results of this study reveal that the politics of food access are complex and intersectional but nevertheless discernable and most importantly changeable. This dissertation concludes by exploring how this materially and community-based process of research facilitated the re-creation of relationships between food and food practices by transforming social structures and, in turn, human agents. I also explore how the relations of power influencing food access are intricately connected to the production and reproduction of health disparities more broadly, and argue for the use of materialist praxis in future research focused on the social production of health as well as for the development of social change efforts focused on redressing unequal and unjust relations of power influencing access to food.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-06042008-142122 |
| Date | 06 June 2008 |
| Creators | Freedman, Darcy Ann |
| Contributors | Paul W. Speer, Marino A. Bruce, Craig Anne Heflinger, Kenneth A. Wallston, Monica J. Casper |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-06042008-142122/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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