 | |
| Author | Laura Wright |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University of Georgia Press |
Publication date | 2015 |
| ISBN | 978-0820348568 |
The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (2015) by Laura Wright coined the term and proposed the academic field of vegan studies and serves as the field's foundational text.
The book was the first to propose an academic field, vegan studies, to study veganism as an identity, lifestyle and ideology, as well as to analyze historical and contemporary reception and depiction of veganism. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] : 3
Some reviewers and academics embraced the identification of a new field of study, calling the book a "foundational work" [6] and "the foundational text for the nascent field" of vegan studies. [7] [8] [9] In her foreword to the book, Carol J. Adams says, "Thanks to this work, we now have a new category: the vegan studies-loving vegan." [10]
In 2016 Kathryn Dolan said in the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment that it "will clearly become an area of further study." [11] Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood called the book "the first major academic monograph" on veganism and the humanities. [4] Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simonsen called it "the first vegan studies monograph to be published by a university press." [5] : 3
In 2018 Dario Martinelli and Ausra Berkmaniene said "The presence and legitimacy of 'vegan studies' within the academic world, especially since Wright cared to formalize the expression and define a paradigm, is something that should no longer require an explanation or a justification," and that in writing the book Wright had "coined the expression". [12]
In 2019 Marzena Kubisz called The Vegan Studies Project "the monograph which creates the foundations for vegan studies". [13]
Other academics were less sure the book had created a new field. In 2016 Fabio Parasecoli said he was "not sure if Wright's intention to open a whole new field of inquiry and scholarship will come to fruition, but she definitely offers many arguments that deserve attention and reflection." [14] In 2018 Josh Milburn said he would if offered the opportunity teach a vegan studies course, but that he remained "unsure whether there truly is a literature sufficiently unified to be labelled a new discipline." [15]
Public Books called positing a new academic field an "audacious gambit." [1] Milburn said it "provocatively called for" a new academic field. [15] Dolan, writing in the journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment , said Wright proposes "a new area she names 'vegan studies'" and calls her style "clear and personable." [3] HuffPost said it "offers many arguments that deserve attention and reflection." [16] University of Sunderland veganism and animal studies researcher Alex Lockwood said it "launched the new academic field of vegan studies." [2] Alice Crary called it "groundbreaking." [17] Quinn and Westwood called the book "the first major academic monograph" [4] : 8 on veganism and the humanities and said it suggests how vegan scholars might situate themselves theoretically. [4] : 17 Castricano and Simonsen called it "an important book" and "the first vegan studies monograph to be published by a university press." [5] : 3
In 2016 Renan Larue, author of Le végétarisme et ses ennemis (2014), began teaching a vegan studies course at the University of California, Santa Barbara. [18] [19] [20] In May 2016 the conference Towards a Vegan Theory, with Wright keynoting, was held at the University of Oxford to discuss the place of vegan theory within the humanities. [6]
In 2016 the collection Critical Perspectives on Veganism was published, with editors Casatricano and Simonsen introducing it as a vegan studies text. [5] In 2017 Peter Adkins placed "Ulysses in dialogue with recent writings on...the emergence of what is being termed 'vegan studies' to suggest a vegetarian reading of Joyce’s novel," citing the book. [21] Wright has since edited two collections, Through a Vegan Studies Lens: Textual Ethics and Lived Activism, (2019) and The Routledge Handbook of Vegan Studies (2021). [22] [23] [24]
Appalachian State University offered a fall 2019 Honors Seminar, What is Vegan Studies? Exploring an Emerging Field, saying that with the book's publication "a powerful transdisciplinary field has emerged which is in turn influencing work across the disciplines" and called the book and Wright's more recent works the field's "founding texts". [25]
Carol J. Adams is an American writer, feminist, and animal rights advocate. She is the author of several books, including The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) and The Pornography of Meat (2004), focusing in particular on what she argues are the links between the oppression of women and that of non-human animals. She was inducted into the Animal Rights Hall of Fame in 2011.
Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from some 400 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.
The University of Hawaiʻi Press is a university press that is part of the University of Hawaiʻi.
An academic discipline or academic field is a subdivision of knowledge that is taught and researched at the college or university level. Disciplines are defined and recognized by the academic journals in which research is published, and the learned societies and academic departments or faculties within colleges and universities to which their practitioners belong. Academic disciplines are conventionally divided into the humanities, including language, art and cultural studies, and the scientific disciplines, such as physics, chemistry, and biology; the social sciences are sometimes considered a third category.
Carnism is a concept used in discussions of humanity's relation to other animals, defined as a prevailing ideology in which people support the use and consumption of animal products, especially meat. Carnism is presented as a dominant belief system supported by a variety of defense mechanisms and mostly unchallenged assumptions. The term carnism was coined by social psychologist and author Melanie Joy in 2001 and popularized by her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows (2009).
Melanie Joy is an American social psychologist and author, primarily notable for coining and promulgating the term carnism. She is the founding president of nonprofit advocacy group Beyond Carnism, previously known as Carnism Awareness & Action Network (CAAN), as well as a former professor of psychology and sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published the books Strategic Action for Animals, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows and Beyond Beliefs.
The Open Library of Humanities is a nonprofit, diamond open access publisher in the humanities and social sciences founded by Martin Paul Eve and Caroline Edwards. Founded in 2015, OLH publishes 27 scholarly journals as of 2022, including a mega journal, also called Open Library of Humanities, which was modeled on PLOS but not affiliated with it.
The Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS) (부산외국어대학교 지중해지역원) is an interdisciplinary institute that promotes, facilitates and publishes research in the field of Mediterranean Studies in South Korea. The IMS provides a center for holistic research and analysis of the Mediterranean Area, as well as academic teaching on the region. The IMS’s objectives are: fostering the establishment of Mediterranean Studies in the European and Middle-Eastern Research Areas, publishing scholarly literature on the Mediterranean, and establishing collaborative networks of researchers, academics and Mediterranean organizations across the world by organizing international conferences, seminars and ongoing global collaborations. With the beginning of the Humanities Korea (HK) project, IMS has concentrated on research with ICT experts in order for cultivation of advanced academic achievement in integrative field.
Tzachi Zamir is an Israeli philosopher and literary critic specialising in the philosophy of literature, the philosophy of theatre, and animal ethics. He is Professor of English and General & Comparative Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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".
Laura Wright is a professor of English at Western Carolina University. Wright proposed vegan studies as a new academic field, and her 2015 book The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror served as the foundational text of the discipline. As of 2021 she had edited two collections of articles about vegan studies.
Corey Lee Wrenn is an American sociologist specializing in human-animal studies, the sociology of the animal rights movement, ecofeminism, and vegan studies. She is presently a lecturer in the School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research at the University of Kent.
Eva Haifa Giraud is a cultural and critical theorist and a scholar of media studies and feminist science studies whose work concerns activism and non-anthropocentric theory. She is presently a senior lecturer in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield. Her 2019 monograph What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion was published by Duke University Press; her second sole-authored book, Veganism: Politics, Practice and Theory, was published in 2021 by Bloomsbury.
Shahd Alshammari is a Kuwaiti writer, academic scholar and assistant professor of the English language. She is well known for her researches that focus on human and women's rights, disability issues and, recently, illness narrative. She published six books, in total, three of which she was the author, and the other three co-author. Additionally, she participated in over 15 conference, both as attendee and Keynote speaker, and discussed different topics in the fields of literature and culture. In 2019, she was nominated for the British Council Alumni Awards – Social Impact. In 2021 she won Outstanding Monograph of the Year from the National Communication Association's (NAC).
Rodney John Charles Preece was a British-Canadian political philosopher and historian of animal rights and vegetarianism. He was professor emeritus in the Department of Political Science at Wilfrid Laurier University. Preece authored and edited 19 books on topics including animal rights and welfare, vegetarianism, German politics, socialization in Europe, and political theory.
Fabio Parasecoli is an Italian academic and author, whose work focusses on the intersectionality of food, media and politics. He is currently a Food Studies professor at NYU Steinhardt.
Jodey Castricano is a Canadian scholar of English and cultural studies who is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. They are known for their work in critical theory, critical animal studies, and gothic studies.
Richard Twine is a British sociologist whose research addresses environmental sociology as well as gender, human/animal and science studies. He is noted for his "foundational" work in critical animal studies. He is a Reader in the Department of History, Geography & Social Sciences at Edge Hill University and chair of the Research Advisory Committee of The Vegan Society.
Emelia Quinn is a British scholar of English known for her work developing vegan theory. She is an Assistant Professor of World Literatures and Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam.
Gregory Frank Tague is an American multidisciplinary literary scholar. He spent most of his career at St. Francis College. He is the founder of the scholarly journal ASEBL Journal and the literary journal Literary Veganism, and general editor for the publisher Bibliotekos.