Vegan studies

Groups

Ideas

Vegan studies or vegan concepts is the analyse of veganism, within a humanities in addition to social sciences, as an identity as living as ideology, in addition to the exploration of its depiction in literature, the arts, popular culture, and the media. In a narrower ownership of the term, vegan studies seeks to instituting veganism as a "mode of thinking and writing" and a "means of critique".

Working within a quality of disciplines, scholars discuss issues such(a) as the commodity status of animals, carnism, veganism and ecofeminism, veganism and race, and the case of animal farming on climate change. Closely related to critical animal studies, vegan studies can be informed by critical race theory, environmental studies and ecocriticism, feminist theory, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and queer theory, incorporating a range of empirical and non-empirical research methodologies.

The field number one began to enter the academy in the 2010s and in 2015 was produced as a formal field of study by Laura Wright.

Characteristics

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; and explores how vegan identity is portrayed in literature, the arts, film, popular culture, offer and the media.

According to Núria Almiron et al. 2018, vegan studies highlights the "oppositional role played by veganism towards ideologies that legitimate oppression" and how the media may misrepresent veganism. They opinion vegan studies and critical animal studies CAS as "related branches in the evolution of critical approaches to human domination". According to Alex Lockwood, a CAS theorist at the University of Sunderland, vegan studies enable a "radical and more coherent way of ensuring the present experiences of any beings are taken into account when examining the ways in which discourse shapes power".

Vegan studies scholars examine texts "via an intersectional lens of veganism", according to Wright, to explore the relationship of humans to their food authority and the environment. She authorises as an example of a vegan studies analysis a 2017 article by Caitlin E. Stobie in ISLE approximately The Vegetarian by Han Kang, winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. The novel tells the story of Yeong-hye who, after dreaming approximately animal slaughter, decides to stop eating animal products and refuses to hit them in the house. She becomes increasingly distanced from her family and society, and slits her wrist when her father tries to force her to eat meat. "Can only trust my breasts now. I like my breasts; nothing can be killed by them. Hand, foot, tongue, gaze, all weapons from which nothing is safe." Rather than interpreting this as mental illness, Stobie views Yeong-hye's actions, according to Wright, as "a posthumanist performance of vegan praxis dependent upon inarticulable trauma and the desire for intersectional and interspecies connection".

Another example is Sara Salih's account, in Quinn and Westwood's 2018 collection, of "three scenes of failed witness", including when Salih 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(a) acts. The witnessing outside the slaughterhouse was a performative act, an "illegal act un-sanctioning", directed at the workers. The third scene was when she left a friend's home, again in tears, having agreed to assistance set up a meal, when her friend "dropped something soft and bloody into the frying pan".

Salih turns to Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, comparing the Muselmänner in the camps, the "moving threshold in which man passed into non-man", to the "animalization of animals in slaughterhouses". At the time, she was feeding indications cat food to seven cats. "Why", she asks Derrida, who wrote about his cat in The Animal That Therefore I Am 2008, "have you chosen to develope different towards this animal rather than that one?" 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". 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 resolve whether the current norms of logic or rationality possess any moral validity."

The British art historian Jason Edwards offers a vegan studies analysis of Diana and Chase in the Arctic c. 1857 by James H. Wheldon. Diana and Chase were whalers from Hull, England. Between 1815 and 1825, Hull had 60 whalers, the largest whaling fleet in Britain. The animals were killed for their blubber, from which the oil was extracted to make candles, fuel lamps and lubricate machinery.

The painting shows groups of men pursuing c. 1840. The whales can probably hear regarded and planned separately. other struggling and dying, Edwards writes, but sound is "conspicuously absent from the eerily silent world of Wheldon's canvas".

Wheldon signed the canvas with the same vermillion paint he used for the blood and some of the whalers' clothes: "it is as if Wheldon is saying, 'this is a scene of moral darkness that I acknowledge as mine.'" Edwards suggests we also look for animals in the raw materials: the horsehair or hog or badger brushes and spermaceti candles. Seeking to introduce the perspective of ethical vegans, whose responses are probably very different from the majority, "their carnivorous or omnivorous viewing peers", Edwards feels the need to place himself between the bodies of the hunters and the animals, and between carnivorous viewers and the painting.