Locating the "When" of Access Through Genre and Infrastructure

Abstract

Technological innovation within federal welfare programs is often marketed as a way to resolve issues of access. Locating the “When” of Access Through Genre and Infrastructure traces technological innovation within the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program’s benefit redemption in order to locate when access happens (and doesn’t) for program participants. WIC is a federal program that provides grants to states to resolve food insecurity, nutritional risk, and promote overall health and well-being for eligible program participants. One primary function of the WIC program is providing supplemental foods to participants. Over the last decade, the WIC program has undergone technological change to transition from a paper-based to an Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) benefit redemption method, changing how program participants purchase supplemental foods in order to “streamline” the program and address issues of access. This technological change includes changes to WIC’s information infrastructure— the ways information is collected, stored, and shared across the large organization and various stakeholders—including grocery store vendors, technology partners, banks, and private contractors. Information infrastructures are made up of many genres that help enable social action. Through a qualitative study consisting of infrastructural inversion, resistant reading, and interviews, I examine how an information infrastructure genre, the Approved Product List (APL), emerges from this technological innovation and functions for (and against) program participants. I analyze the shift from paper to EBT benefit redemption as an infrastructural change that reveals key stakeholders, as well as the pragmatic and ideological functions of the APL. I also analyze the emergence and persistence of the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis that further reveals the values built into the design of the EBT system. I use this analysis as a way to contextualize interviews with program participants to understand how they navigate “the system” and create “when” moments of access for themselves. Overall, this study reveals that program participants must input additional time and labor to successfully redeem their benefits within a hyper-standardized, high-stakes environment in which interactions with cashiers during checkout are often negative and embarrassing. Additionally, this study provides implications for the additional burdens women of color and disabled people face because of the mediation of the APL and its role in increasing the visibility of vulnerability of people who are already more highly surveilled and policed. Ultimately, this project encourages writing studies to pay attention to the infrastructural genres that may go unnoticed but have significant influence on shaping access for people in their everyday lives.