Fall 2018 – Everybody Eats: Enhancing Food Networks and Accessibility of WIC Participants

In building this sub area of research I use feminist pragmatism as a theoretical base and continual guidance for my research team and their individual research projects. This project is physically centered around a Brazos Valley Women Infant Care (WIC) location. The overarching research endeavor of my team is to investigate, collaborate and aid in nutritional foodways for WIC participants. By situating WIC research in this way, the five philosophical themes of feminist-pragmatism are invoked. The first two themes of feminist pragmatism are focused on the classroom area of this research project, valuing experience and epistemology. My students focus the generation of their individual research questions through their own experiences and interests within the social environment. This provides the team with the tools necessary to begin building an epistemological lens that, unlike the dominant academic rhetoric, understands social action as a precursor to research and not simply the offshoot. Team: My students consider the overarching research endeavor, and begin to formulate a research question of a barrier to nutritional foodways for WIC participants. They investigate through legal theory and research the overarching social annals, complexities and ramifications of this problem. We consistently correspond, providing each other group support for the emotional and epistemological strain of this research, and push each other forward. Through this research they then focus their educational endeavors (theme 3) on investigating their research question and create a community solution of social action to said research question (theme 4). Community: The culmination of these themes leads to the fifth theme of feminist pragmatism which is the endeavor for diversity and democracy. This theme focuses on the need to facilitate community and equality, striving for a pluralistic community that values the experiences and knowledge of minority groups, despite the devaluing of said knowledge and experience by the dominant frame. As apparent here, the first four themes aim to build said community, value and understand the WIC participants voices. Striving to understand their experience beyond that of a positivistic “research subjects” approach. By doing this, we involve WIC participants and aim to provide them with tools against nutritional barriers as our research develops. This is done using community gardens, personal self-watering gardens, low budget nutritionally and demographically conscious recipe books, and as the research develops possibly more. The loose formulation and aims of the community outcomes is purposeful, as early feminist pragmatists understood that epistemology is ever developing and changing, there is no set community aim beyond increasing equality and diversity.