Exploring Community Food Insecurity Through a Culture-Centered Lens: Conflict and Tensions in ‘Voices of Hunger’

Abstract

Through engagement with a local, community-driven food insecurity coalition entitled Voices of Hunger, this analysis elaborates upon the conflicts and tensions present when food pantry users organized to enact agency and resistance against the local emergency food assistance structure. Particularly, how do community stakeholders organize and engage with local structures to argue for community-level emergency food assistance policy changes, and what is the nature of the communication that take places in this context? This retrospective interrogation suggests that when the voices of the food insecure are foregrounded, multidimensional structural constraints serve to further marginalize the food insecure.

KEYWORDS:

• anti-hunger
• coalition
• culture-centered
• food insecurity