Vegan studies or vegan theory is the study of veganism, within the humanities and social sciences, as an identity and ideology, and the exploration of its depiction in literature, the arts, popular culture, and the media. In a narrower use of the term, vegan studies seek to establish veganism as a "mode of thinking and writing" and a "means of critique". As an academic field, vegan studies examines how veganism shapes and is shaped by culture, ethics, politics, and representation, offering a framework for understanding vegan identity and its social implications. Working within a variety of disciplines, scholars discuss issues such as the commodity status of animals, carnism, veganism and ecofeminism, veganism and race, and the effect 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 first began to enter the academy in the 2010s, and in 2015 was proposed as a formal field of study by Laura Wright.
Development The development of vegan studies emerged gradually from several overlapping intellectual movements, including the animal turn of the 1970s–1980s, the rise of human–animal studies and critical animal studies in the early 2000s, and the growth of vegetarian and vegan scholarship across feminist theory, environmental humanities, and cultural studies. By the mid‑2010s, these strands converged into a recognizable academic field.
Animal turn 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)—triggered an animal turn in the humanities and social sciences: an increased interest in human–nonhuman relations.
The period led to the development of human–animal studies, which examines how humans and nonhumans interact, and, in the early 2000s, to critical animal studies (CAS), an academic field dedicated to studying and ending the exploitation of animals. Named in 2007, CAS grew directly out of the animal liberation movement. Criticizing human–animal studies as anthropocentric, and aiming instead for "total liberation" (including of humans), CAS scholars reject "speciesism and anthropocentric ethics" and declare themselves committed to the "abolition of animal and ecological exploitation, oppression and domination". Veganism is "a baseline for CAS praxis". In the 1990s, several works of vegetarian studies appeared, informing the later development of vegan studies. These included Carol J. Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990), described as one of vegan studies' foundational texts, which deployed the idea of the "absent referent:" "The function of the absent referent is to keep our 'meat' separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal ... to keep something from being seen as having been someone." Adams linked vegetarianism to feminism, arguing that "the killing of animals for food is a feminist issue that feminists have failed to claim". Other works that influenced vegan studies include Nick Fiddes's Meat: A Natural Symbol (1991); Colin Spencer's The Heretic's Feast (1996); Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution (2006); and Rod Preece's Sins of the Flesh: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought (2008), published by the University of British Columbia Press.
Entry into the academy
In 2010 a United Nations Environment Programme report recommended a global move toward a vegan diet, which over the following decade became increasingly mainstream in the Western world. According to University of Oxford English literature scholars Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood, veganism's "entry into the academy" also began around 2010. Shortly after the publication of her 2010 edited collection, Sistah Vegan: Black Female Vegans Speak on Food, Identity, Health, and Society, A. Breeze Harper sought to apply "critical race and black feminist studies to vegan studies in the US". That year, 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". In December 2013, Keele University media scholar Eva Giraud discussed the relationship between veganism, animal studies, ecofeminism, and posthumanism. Academic work on veganism appeared in Nik Taylor and Richard Twine's 2014 collection, The Rise of Critical Animal Studies: From the Margins to the Centre, and in December 2014, Quinn and Westwood addressed a workshop at the University of York, organized by the art historian Jason Edwards for the 70th anniversary of the founding of the Vegan Society in the UK, to discuss "the fast developing field of vegan theory".
Proposal as a formal field of study
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