Vegan studies

Donald Watson, secretary of the British Vegetarian Society's Leicester branch, coined the term vegan in 1944, when he created the Vegan News for strict vegetarians who would not eat any animal products.[15] Several works of philosophy and ecofeminism in the 1970s and 1980s—including Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975); Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature (1980); and Tom Regan's The Case for Animal Rights (1983)—helped to trigger what became known as the "animal turn" in the humanities and social sciences,[16] an increased interest in human–nonhuman relations and to some extent a paradigm shift in how that relationship was discussed.[lower-alpha 3]

The period led to the development of human–animal studies (also known as animal studies),[21][lower-alpha 4] the study of how humans and nonhumans interact, how humans have classified other animals, and what that social construction means.[24] It also led, in the early 2000s, to the development of critical animal studies (CAS), an academic field dedicated to studying and ending the exploitation of animals.[25] Named in 2007, CAS grew directly out of the animal liberation movement, linking "activism, academia and animal suffering".[26] Veganism is described as "a baseline for CAS praxis".[2] Criticizing human–animal studies as anthropocentric, and aiming for "total liberation" (including of humans), CAS scholars declared themselves committed to the "abolition of animal and ecological exploitation".[lower-alpha 5]

Carol J. Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) became influential within vegan studies.

In the 1990s and 2000s, several works informed the later development of vegan studies.[28] Described as one of the field's foundational texts,[29] Carol J. Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) linked vegetarianism directly to feminism. She argued that "the killing of animals for food is a feminist issue that feminists have failed to claim".[30] Other works that influenced vegan studies[28] include Nick Fiddes's Meat: A Natural Symbol (1992);[31] Colin Spencer's The Heretic's Feast (1996);[32] Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution (2006);[33] and Rod Preece's Sins of the Flesh (2008).[34]

A. Breeze Harper, 2016

In December 2013, in the journal PhaenEx, media scholar Eva Giraud discussed the relationship of veganism to animal studies, ecofeminism and posthumanism.[35][lower-alpha 6] Academic work on veganism appeared in Nick Taylor and Richard Twine's 2014 collection, The Rise of Critical Animal Studies,[37] and in December that year, Emilia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood addressed a workshop at the University of York, organized by the art historian Jason Edwards, to discuss "the fast developing field of vegan theory".[38]

Quinn and Westwood write that veganism's "entry into the academy" began around 2010.[39] Shortly after the publication that year of her collection Sistah Vegan,[40] A. Breeze Harper announced a new "critical race and veg*n studies intersect" research group on her website, The Sistah Vegan Project,[41] and was working on "applications of critical race and black feminist studies to vegan studies in the US".[42] Also in 2010, the Journal for Critical Animal Studies published an edition devoted to the perspectives of women of color, which had been "eerily absent from critical animal studies and vegan studies in general".[43] They included an essay by Harper, "Race as a 'Feeble Matter' in Veganism".[44]

Laura Wright, 2018

Vegan studies was proposed as a new academic field by Laura Wright, professor of English at Western Carolina University, in October 2015 in her book The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror,[45] described as the "first major academic monograph in the humanities focused on veganism".[46] Wright's work was prompted by research for her doctoral dissertation into J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) and The Lives of Animals (1999),[47] and was further influenced by Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat.[48] Wright frames vegan studies as "inherently ecofeminist", according to Caitlin E. Stobie.[49][lower-alpha 7]

In 2016 the French scholar Renan Larue, author of Le végétarisme et ses ennemis: Vingt-cinq siècles de débats (2015), began teaching a vegan studies course at the University of California, Santa Barbara.[51] Reportedly the first such course in the United States,[52] it has explored animal ethics, pathocentrism, Melanie Joy's concept of carnism, Peter Singer's utilitarianism, Tom Regan's and Gary Francione's rights-based approach, Marti Kheel's ecofeminism, and Carol J. Adams's ethics of care.[53] In 2019 the University of Washington and Appalachian State University began offering courses in vegan studies.[54][55]

In May 2016 Quinn and Westwood organized a conference at Wolfson College, Oxford, Towards a Vegan Theory, at which Wright gave the keynote address.[56]

Other works in vegan studies followed, including a 2016 collection, Critical Perspectives on Veganism, published by Palgrave Macmillan and edited by Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simonsen;[57] a special cluster in the journal ISLE in December 2017;[58] and a 2018 collection edited by Quinn and Woodward, Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture, based on the Oxford conference and also published by Palgrave Macmillan.[59] [60] According to Nathan Poirier, writing in Journal of Popular Culture, "Wright examines cultural discourses that shape perceptions of vegan identity and practice post‐9/11 in the United States, Castricano and Simonsen critically assess current vegan praxis relative to its radical origins as it gains popularity. Thinking Veganism develops vegan studies by problematizing any absolute definition of the word 'vegan.'"[61] Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism (2019) was published by University of Nevada Press and edited by Wright.[62][63]

In 2016 Melanie Joy called vegan studies a field "whose time has come".[64]

In 2016 Melanie Joy and Jens Tuider called vegan studies a "field of research whose time has come". It establishes veganism as an academic topic; gathers research on veganism, the history of veganism, and carnism; examines veganism's ethical, political and cultural basis and repercussions;[65] and explores how vegan identity is presented in literature, the arts, film, popular culture, advertising and the media.[66] Adams wrote that vegan studies examines "the vegan phobic, the vegan deniers, the nonvegan 'vegan', the problematic 'hegan,' the feminist vegan, the animal activist vegan".[67] According to another description, it highlights the "oppositional role played by veganism towards ideologies that legitimate oppression".[68] Writing in 2018, the philosopher Josh Milburn remained unconvinced that there was a literature about veganism "sufficiently unified to be labeled a new discipline".[69]

According to Wright, vegan studies is a "lived and embodied ethic"[70] providing "a new lens for ecocritical textual analysis". Vegan studies scholars examine texts "via an intersectional lens of veganism" to explore the relationship of humans to their food sources and the environment. In Wright's view, the vegan body and vegan identity "constitute a performative project and an entity in a state of perpetual transformation".[4]

Wright offers as an example of a vegan studies analysis a 2018 article by Stobie in ISLE about The Vegetarian by Han Kang, winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize: "Rather than read protagonist Yeong-hye's plight as the result of illogical mental illness, Stobie reads her character's actions—to eschew eating meat to the point of starvation, even when members of her family try to force feed it to her—as a posthumanist performance of vegan praxis dependent upon inarticulable trauma and the desire for intersectional and interspecies connection."[71]

Another example is Sara Salih's account, in Quinn and Westwood's 2018 collection, of "three scenes of failed witness", including when she left a formal lunch in tears when the chicken dish arrived, and when she and others stood staring (pointlessly, she felt at the time) at slaughterhouse workers using electric prods to push pigs off a lorry. Salih argues that there is in fact an ethical purpose to witnessing such acts. The witnessing outside the slaughterhouse was a performative act, an "illegal act un-sanctioning", directed at the workers.[72] At the same time as asking these questions, Salih was feeding standard cat food to seven cats.[73] "Why", she asks Derrida, who wrote about his cat in The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), "have you chosen to turn towards this animal rather than that one?"[74] She suggests that the scale of suffering makes "[o]ur imaginations baulk"; it seems absurd to understand that "we are in the presence of the dead ... when faced with a scoopful of kibble."[75] Nevertheless she advises: "Look as closely as you can at your bowl or the neighbour's bowl or the cat's bowl, bear witness, and then decide whether the current norms of logic or rationality possess any moral validity."[76]

Almiron, Cole and Freeman write that vegan studies and critical animal studies (CAS) share common roots as "related branches in the evolution of critical approaches to human domination".[2][lower-alpha 8] Wright views vegan studies as "informed by and divergent from" animal studies, including critical animal studies.[77] According to Larue, vegan studies is "both narrower and broader than animal studies". It intersects with critical animal studies but encompasses fields such as environmental studies and nutrition, which play an important role in the way veganism has been perceived, promoted, or criticized in the last few decades and today."[lower-alpha 2]

According to Alex Lockwood of the University of Sunderland, vegan studies offers a "radical and more coherent way of ensuring the present experiences of all beings are taken into account when examining the ways in which discourse shapes power".[79] It "engages a lived politics" of empathy and care, as Wright describes it.[80]