Public health policies profoundly shape individuals' embodied sense of self as well as the organization of resources by discursively constructing identities, knowledge, power and risk. For health and organizational communication scholars, understanding how policy discourses are developed, legitimized, and implemented are salient concerns. I engage these issues through a case study of the Deerfield Local School District's School Health Advisory Committee (SHAC). Formed in response to federal policy mandates, the SHAC's mission is to improve the district’s health environment. Specifically, I investigated how the committee communicatively organized resources for health amidst local exigencies and material conditions.
I employed interpretive research strategies including participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and document analysis to collect discourse from SHAC members and stakeholders. Additionally, I gathered insights from students served by the Deerfield SHAC using participatory sketching. I analyzed the data using poststructural feminist and narrative theories. My interpretation of the discourses centered around five themes: participants' definitions of health, the paradoxes of committee membership, members' narrative sense-making of resistance and power, the absence of particular stakeholders' voices in SHAC narratives, and narrative challenges for sustainable organizing.
My analysis of the SHAC's discourse highlighted how members legitimized the committee’s organizing practices by framing parents from a deficit-oriented perspective, and shifting attention away from social determinants of health. I describe how assumptions about stakeholders’ values and health literacy were further invoked in narratives that naturalized the exclusion of specific voices, such as parents and children, from the SHAC. Then, I narrate the tensions between symbolic-material concerns that emerged from SHAC meetings and conversations with members about the committee's practices. Finally, I outline practical implications for the SHAC and describe the study's limitations and areas for future research.