In this month's Expert Series, RAC member, Dr Eva Giraud, discusses an academic workshop on Vegan Narratives at the University of Brighton which was attended by a number of academics, activists and practitioners with an interest in veganism.
Vegan Narratives and Storytelling: A Critical Assessment in the Spaces of ‘Post-Activism’
In his 2018 piece “Looking Backward, Moving Forward” Richard White poses the question of how vegan politics can productively move forward in light of its recent popularity. While the huge growth of veganism is seen by many as worthy of celebration, White foregrounds some important challenges that need to be addressed in order to ensure that a vegan politics that is committed to animal ethics – and that, crucially, that draws connections with other questions of social justice and inequality – is not displaced by a “lifestyle veganism” that is “uncoupled and detached from related actions relevant to inter-species social justice.”
Similar concerns about the potentials and challenges posed by veganism’s rising popularity were central to “Vegan Narratives and Storytelling”: a one-day workshop convened by Julie Doyle, Mike Goodman and Nathan Farrell at the University of Brighton on 7th December 2018. The event drew together a number of academics, activists, and practitioners who had an interest in veganism; its aim was to engage with the potentials of veganism’s growing prominence, while also identifying tensions that need to be navigated.
The day was divided into two halves. The morning session consisted of a number of ten minute presentations about different issues associated with contemporary vegan politics, while the afternoon took the form of a workshop where participants sought to identify key issues, questions, and areas that required further research.
Broadly speaking, the morning’s presentations fell into three categories: Firstly, talks that offered informative insights into people’s practical experience of supporting vegan politics; secondly, research about contemporary initiatives to reduce the consumption of animal products; and, thirdly, agenda-setting presentations that sought to map existing research, set out further questions that needed to be asked, and pointed to hopeful visions for the future.
Presentations that fell into the first category included some valuable reflections from the Vegan Society’s Elena Orde, about how to maintain the centrality of animal ethics in a context where other narratives about veganism were gaining prominence. Resonating with a number of other talks, Orde underlined the need to avoid feeding into portrayals of veganism as a health fad; as she pointed out, the British Dietetic Association has worked with the Vegan Society to confirm that veganism is healthy at all stages of life. Media framings, however, often consist of extreme portrayals of veganism as either the ultimate in healthy eating or as offering heath concerns. These polarised depictions can make it difficult to create space for more nuanced depictions of veganism as a diet that – like any other – can be healthy or unhealthy and requires nutritional awareness. Difficulties in media representation were also a theme of journalist Jessica Brown’s talk, who discussed the challenge of creating space to explore more complex portrayals of vegan politics in a media environment that often demands dramatic “hooks” to capture attention.
Concern with depictions of veganism was also central to the findings of some of the research papers that were presented during the morning session. Carol Morris, for instance, offered an excellent analysis of media representations of Meat Free Mondays, which showed that even though national newspaper reports on meat reduction often framed it in a positive light, these narratives routinely focused on the environmental impact of veganism and role of individual consumer action. Little was said, however, about animal ethics, or questions of food governance (which would be central to more substantive change). Alex Sexton’s fascinating research into the politics of alternative proteins also offered an ambivalent picture. The development of meat substitutes, Sexton suggested, can be problematic in contexts where they are embedded into existing, unsustainable, food systems. In such contexts, labels such as “plant based” could potentially increase the opacity of food production, by deflecting more sustained questions about environmental problems and social equalities that are caused by other aspects of these systems.
These papers offered invaluable examples of the sort of research that could be undertaken to address questions that were raised by the final type of papers presented at the workshop. Julie Doyle’s introductory talk, for instance, emphasised the importance of climate change as a narrative that engaged people with veganism, while also suggesting that questions still need to be asked about the complex relationships between animal ethics and environmental vegan narratives. In particular, it is important to explore whether environmental concerns support long-term engagement with veganism in the same way as commitments to animal ethics. Doyle’s questions were illustrated with reference to her own journey to veganism, with the personal tone of the paper resonating with many of the other talks. For instance, the struggle to carve out space for researching veganism within academic disciplines (such as Sociology) was detailed by influential figures in the field of vegan studies, such as Matthew Cole. Matt Adams also offered a helpful sketch of tools he had found useful in rethinking human-animal relations that could be drawn from existing academic work, as a means of unsettling “banal speciesism.” This theme was nicely elaborated on by Alex Lockwood’s reflections on how he re-wrote his own book, The Chernobyl Privileges, to remove this everyday speciesism and denaturalise the use of animal products. Rather than simply promoting veganism in an overt sense, Lockwood suggests, this commitment to a vegan literature could instead take the form of constructing a world where vegan politics is just a normative backdrop to events.
The morning culminated with Mike Goodman’s paper, which drew together many of the concerns raised by these other talks, setting out key areas that require further research when it comes to debates surrounding contemporary vegan narratives, including questions of whose voices are authorized in these narratives; what frames are used; what imaginaries exist around alternative foods (and the role appeals to science might have in these debates). These provocations fed into the afternoon session, which fleshed out further areas of research that needed to be considered when crafting vegan narratives.
Although the afternoon discussion was lively and informative for a number of reasons, I want to focus on two points I found particularly interesting. Firstly, an area that was felt to be lacking in research was how audiences actually responded to media debates about veganism. Some valuable work has already been done about representations of veganism, which has identified common frames, stereotypes, and problems. As one of the workshop participants, Naomi Griffin, pointed out, however, it would be valuable to conduct further audience research into the reception of these depictions. During the discussion we found we could only comment anecdotally on how people were actively responding to negative portrayals of veganism or speculate how individuals might interpret the heated debates they read online. As a wealth of work in media studies has shown, however, people’s negotiation of media texts is often complex, and individuals can resist dominant frames. Personally speaking, as an academic based in a media department, this seemed like a very fertile area of further investigation.
The second reflection I have is more personal. In my own presentation I discussed my forthcoming book, which contains sustained discussion of vegan activism. I wrote the book after repeatedly finding criticisms of veganism in academic contexts. These criticisms have often labelled vegan politics as essentialist and simplistic, an individual lifestyle response to the much broader problems of labour inequalities and environmental destruction that are associated with large-scale food systems. Veganism has also regularly been seen as an elitist form of lifestyle politics that not everyone can access. I began writing the book over ten years ago, when I felt increasingly uncomfortable about the way these descriptions clashed with my own experiences (such as the food activism work I had been involved in with the fantastic Veggies Catering Campaign). These portrayals often also neglected long traditions within activism, which has explored how veganism can work as an element of anti-capitalist protest that intersects with other issues (related to environmental and labour politics, for instance). In the book, one of my arguments is that negative portrayals of veganism are themselves often overly simplistic and essentialist. I argue that it is important to avoid caricatures of veganism to instead understand some of the messy and reflective ways vegan politics is enacted in practice, enactments that are often self-reflexively critical and attempt to ensure veganism does not become a form of single issue politics.
As well as finding it helpful to present ideas from my book in the supportive space of the workshop, I found it refreshing to be in a room with other people who shared commitments to developing nuanced and complex narratives about veganism. For instance, during discussions some important points were made about the need to resist outright condemning those engaging in veganism for health motivations or even because it was fashionable (indeed, many of us had become vegan for reasons that could be read as “superficial” but became committed after further research). At the same time, participants still foregrounded some of the ways that popularisation poses problems: especially if it feeds into the sort of reductive, single issue politics that leads to vegan campaigns appropriating slogans from other social justice campaigns (such as #alllivesmatter).
Ultimately, to revisit White’s arguments, what the day underlined for me was that “moving forward” it seems vital to ensure that – even while acknowledging the potentials of veganism’s popularisation – it is still important to pause and take stock of how to create vegan narratives that are genuinely intersectional, and which maintain a sense of veganism’s more radical roots.
The views expressed by our Research News contributors are not necessarily the views of The Vegan Society.
The views expressed by our Research News contributors are not necessarily the views of The Vegan Society.
