Lebanese meal management practices and cultural constructions of food waste.

Food waste is a global issue with major environmental and socio-economic implications. The problem is even worse in Arab countries where tremendous amounts of food are wasted everyday. In this study, we engaged in an ethnographic journey documenting meal management practices in rural Lebanese households as they relate to food waste. We interviewed 60 women from the Chahhar region (closest communities to the nation's largest landfill) who are in charge of their households' food management. We kept detailed reflexive notes of observations and photo-journaled the provision, preparation, preservation, consumption, and disposal of food. We found that despite the enormity of the food waste crisis in Lebanon, the environmental impact was strikingly absent from the participants' construction of food-related practices. Yet, the women exhibited a strong food waste averse behavior rooted in cultural norms and religious beliefs built on active avoidance of food waste. Our findings shed the light on the intricate connections of family and community routines anchored in frugality and hospitality practices.

Transdisciplinary interventions for environmental sustainability.

This paper presents a case study of a transdisciplinary research based on an ex-post assessment of the environmental and socio-behavioral contexts of solid waste management in Lebanese peri-urban communities. Lessons learned are compiled into the Transdisciplinary Interventions for Environmental Sustainability conceptual framework. The approach starts with building a team of researchers and non-academic partners, continues with co-creating solution-oriented knowledge, and ends by integrating and applying the produced knowledge. The co-created knowledge includes the environmental and socio-behavioral ex-post assessment's results. The former reveals low air pollution levels, evidence of waste-related water contamination, and higher self-reported frequencies of ill-health symptoms and diseases closer to the landfill. The latter indicates that the community's perception about waste production differs from the real accounting of generated waste. Nine lessons are identified: (1) inherent common interest between the researchers and the community, (2) flexible interdisciplinary research team, (3) representative citizen committee, (4) contextually-informed outreach coordinator, (5) iterative research process accounting for the shifting socio-political context, (6) common expectations of the research process, (7) boundary objects leading to spin-off activities in the same setting, (8) effective communication strategy, and (9) ex-post assessment of subsequent societal and scientific impacts. The non-phased framework links all nine pointers in a logical order to ease scalability. The study answers a global need for a unified, clear, broadly adopted framework for transdisciplinarity and a deeper understanding of factors ensuring full-circle knowledge co-creation in waste-related contexts in the global South. The study offers managerial and research implications and suggests avenues for further research.

Articulations of Health and Poverty Among Women on WIC.

With the global financial meltdown, the crisis of poverty has deepened in communities across the United States. This essay reports results from a culture-centered project on fostering spaces for listening to the voices of the poor in CrossRoads County, Indiana. It highlights the intersections of health and poverty as they emerge from the narratives of mothers utilizing the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Depression, humiliation, and inaccessibility to health care and healthy living outline the struggles of women as they negotiate their access to health. The articulations of agency are situated around competing cultural narratives that, on the one hand, draw on the threads of individual responsibility which resonate through mainstream discourses of poverty in the United States and, on the other hand, interrogate the structural erasure of the basic capacities of health.

Health, religion, and meaning: a culture-centered study of Druze women.

Against the backdrop of contesting the mainstream biomedical models of health communication, the culture-centered approach suggests dialogic research methodologies to coconstruct meanings of health through direct engagement with cultural communities. In this project, we engaged in in-depth interviews and informal conversations with elderly Druze women and their caregiver daughters to develop an understanding of the intersections of religion and health meanings in the context of aging women in this Lebanese community. Attending to the cultural constructions of health, particularly in religious contexts, opens up the discursive spaces of health communication to alternative cosmologies of health, illness, healing, and curing. Four themes emerged as a result of our grounded theory analysis: health as faith; mistrust, privacy, and modern medicine; polymorphic health experiences; and health as structure. These themes serve as the backdrop for playing out the competing tensions between the local and the global in the realm of interpretations of health meanings.