Food talk: a window into inequality among university students

Abstract

Although initially related to the country's colonial and apartheid history, material inequality in South Africa has deepened, with recent research suggesting that South Africa now has the highest levels of inequality in the world. In this paper, we examine the interactional reproduction of inequality by paying particular attention to the discursive and interactional practices employed in students' talk about food. Specifically, we examine food-related troubles-talk and food-related jokes and humor, showing how students who described food-related troubles produced these troubles as shared and systemic, while students who produced food-related jokes displayed that they take for granted the material resources needed to have a range of food consumption choices available to them, while treating food consumption as a matter of individual choice. These orientations were collaboratively produced through a range of interactionally-organized practices, including patterns of alignment and dis-alignment, pronoun use, laughter, and aspects of the formulation of utterances. While our analysis primarily focuses on these discursive and interactional practices, we also consider how discursive practices can be linked to the material conditions of participants' lives outside of the analyzed interactions.

Feeding inequality: food insecurity, social status and college student health

“…More specifically, these results suggest that food insecurity may be thought of as a stressor which impacts health, in part, because of the ways in which it informs subjective social status. This finding is critical not only because it furthers our understanding of how food insecurity impacts health, but also because it highlights the need to discuss college food insecurity amidst a backdrop of extreme inequality in US university settings (Dominguez‐Whitehead and Whitehead 2014, Henry 2017). If food insecurity impacts health partially because it informs our sense of social positioning, then the structures that minimise or deepen inequality on college campuses will be essential in addressing this public health issue.…”

Politics and activism in the water and sanitation wars in South Africa

“…I also draw on studies that have highlighted how accounts of development, justice, race and class manifests in talk and how alternative accounts, for example, resistance to neoliberalism are undermined (for example, Barnes & Milovanovic, 2015;Dominguez-Whitehead & Whitehead, 2014;Whitehead, 2013).…”

Producing, ratifying, and resisting support in an online support forum

“…RyAn1295 thus treats the troubles being described as shared in common by others apart from Hussain1000, possibly (if the “you” is taken to also refer to him or her) including RyAn1295 (cf. Dominguez-Whitehead and Whitehead, 2014). In doing so, RyAn1295 produces a further SPP that demonstrates (rather than merely claiming, as did his or her previous response) a degree of empathic understanding of the type of troubles Hussain1000 has described.…”