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During the past two decades, opportunities for women's social movement organizations to expand their scope of engagement have often been accompanied by greater vulnerability to donor discipline and scrutiny. Efforts by activists to accommodate the demands for accountability and institutional sustainability by professionalizing their organizations have been instrumental in moving feminist concerns into the political mainstream. However, such institutionalization has frequently contributed to the persistence or creation of social hierarchies within and between women's organizations, as well as to shifts in their social change agendas and action strategies. This article examines the common dilemmas of activists in Latin America and the United States, bringing together two usually separate domains of scholarship to analyze the course, costs, and possibilities of organizational transformation.During the past two decades, spaces for feminist interventions and actions have proliferated within the state, international development arenas, and global policy networks. As women's movements have moved off the street into political institutions across the Americas, questions of how best, in Basu's (1995, 16) words, to "work the state" are far from resolved. Indeed, as Sassen (1998) observed, globalization, privatization, and the proliferation of organized efforts by nonstate actors, especially women, in new human rights regimes are changing the very nature of the state itself. At the same time that this expanding arena for feminist politics offers

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In this manuscript, we expand upon sociological research in lay knowledge about health and healthicization by examining socially mediated ways in which 40 African American adults in two communities acquired information about eating practices. Participants employed a variety of socially informed information-seeking strategies. Many, but not all, used socially prescribed sources exhorting them to maximize their own health and reported an amalgam of experiences concerning their interpretation of healthist messages. Participants variously accepted messages about healthy eating or engaged in strategies of micro-resistance that decentered and/or reinterpreted health promotion discourse. Furthermore, participants used emic community-based resources including those that prioritized familial engagement over individual responsibility in eating practices or that drew upon alternative health practices. We discuss the implications our work has for further research on healthicization and lay knowledge about eating practices, in which community members are actively engaged in meaning-making within local socio-structural contexts.