Eat Well to Work Well: Oppression, Risk, Power, and the Rhetorics of Employee Wellness

Abstract

This dissertation draws on interdisciplinary scholarship, anchored in the rhetoric of health and medicine and technical communication, and employs mixed methods, archival texts, and participant stories to investigate the impact of eating-related discourse and practices in an employee wellness program (EWP) on people’s lived experience with food, health, and their bodies. Wellness as a concept is deeply complex, often fraught, slippery, pervasive, and commodified. Workplace wellness, as exemplified through EWPs, only adds to this complexity through institutional power dynamics and by tying wellness to health insurance coverage and healthcare costs. EWPs provide a good context for examining power and practices around “healthy bodies” and “healthy eating,” and what those practices mean for bodies that are excluded, marginalized, or otherwise framed as unable to participate in the pursuit of wellness. Overall, this study aims to interrogate the intersection of eating habits, institutionalized wellness, and medical ableism broadly, using one EWP as a site of study. The EWP under study here facilitates investigating how employee wellness is built on ableist foundations, how institutional wellness programs wield power in perpetuating dominant biomedical norms around eating habits, body size, and able-bodiedness, and how EWP discourse and practice impacts employees’ lived experience. This project contributes both theoretical and methodological insights to the rhetoric of health and medicine and technical communication. It centers social justice, user experience, and critical theory aimed at revealing power dynamics and systemic oppression in order to demonstrate how material-discursive practices that enact wellness operate outside medical settings.