Vegan Geographies: Ethics Beyond Violence

Progress in Environmental Geography, 2025

The increasing visibility of veganism and plant-based eating makes it timely for environmental geographers to critically engage with these unfolding debates. In this review, we unpack the complex socio-environmental entanglements of contemporary vegan food practices (VFPs), drawing on food geography literature to reflect on the extent to which veganism can, and does, challenge and transform the hegemonic industrial globalised food system. We consider the productive conversations to be had with sustainability, food sovereignty, food justice and vegetal geographies in promoting the collective potential of VFPs beyond the individualisation of mainstreamed, ‘plant-based’ business-as-usual; re-centring production, hitherto relatively invisible in the hegemonic consideration of veganism as just consumption praxis; and engaging with ‘multi-elemental’ plant ethics. This offers a cross-pollination of ideas through a focus on the geographies of veganism, which promotes the development of relational, placed and scaled analyses of vegan identities, experiences and practices while also bridging the intradisciplinary silos within environmental geography. Engaging with the geographies of veganism offers a timely and grounded lens to critically interrogate key contemporary debates around diverse knowledges, sustainability and justice. As such, the alternative ways of doing, being and relating offered by VFPs show real potential for hopeful, responsive and constructive research.

Social & Cultural Geography, 2023

Journal of Political Ecology

Many political ecologists and geographers study ethical diets but most are curiously silent on the topic of death in the food system, specifically what or who is allowed to live and what is let die in the "doing of good." This article aims to show how the practice of eating produces the socio-ecological harm most ethical consumers set out to avoid with their dietary choices. I examine the food systems that produce ethical products for 1) the hierarchical ordering of consumer health in the Global North over the health and well-being of workers in the Global South and 2) how vegetarianism involves the implicit privileging of some animals over others. The article takes take a genealogical approach to the political ecology of food ethics using Black and Indigenous studies in conversation with animal geographies. I draw on Mbembe's (2016) necropolitics, Weheliye's (2014) "not quite human" and Lowe's (2015) critique of humanism to develop a conceptual frame...

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), 2022

Bengal. She is also pursuing her doctoral research from University of North Bengal on the politics and poetics of secular. She has a book chapter entitled "A Historian under Siege: Rethinking Secular Historiography" in an edited book, Religion in South Asian Literature (Routledge, 2021). Her areas of interest are Cultural Studies, South Asian Studies, World Literature and Literary Food Studies.

In recent years, various issues related to non-human animals emerged as elements of interest among public opinion, also involving debates in various academic fields. If philosophy, law, economics and cultural studies can already boast relevant works also at an Italian level, it's not the same for political sociology and social movement studies. In order to analyse the variegated archipelago of national animal advocacy, we stratified the phenomenon into three movement areas (animal care, protectionism, antispeciesism) with the goal to test some hypothetical differences and verify eventual convergences. Our data come from two main sources: an online survey and 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with leaders and/or 'relevant' activists of groups and associations. In this article we specifically focus on those questions related to dietary consumption, veganism as a philosophy/lifestyle and the use of non-human animals for human interest. An increasing number of perspectives are focusing more and more on individual lifestyles and members'/activists' modes of consumption, shifting the action from the streets to the shops. This change of paradigm often blurs more radical and political approaches characterized by structural anti-capitalist frames and actions and that involve(d) forms of popular collective protests aimed at proposing alternatives ideas of future and societies.

Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 2011

Globalization has exacerbated speciesism both socially and economically. Veganism and its subsequent labeling schemes have arisen as an important political site of resistance to growing non-human animal inequality. This paper explores globalization‘s impact on non-human animals, veganism and vegan labeling, as well as important divides within the modern non-human animal rights movement in regards to utopian and pragmatic approaches to alleviating growing speciesism.

Literature on social movements increasingly identifies everyday life as significant to understand political practices and activism. However, scholars have retained a major bias towards movement mobilisation and collective action, often relegating the everyday at the margins of social movements. Studies of prefigurative activism and everyday practices of social change have often focused exclusively on alternative community spaces, such as autonomous social centres and protest camps, and paid less attention to 'ordinary' practices and spaces of activism. The main aim of the paper is to address these issues by suggesting that everyday life may be central to the production of activist spaces and the action of social movements. To achieve this, the relationship(s) between social movements and everyday life is examined by focusing on the vegan movement in France. This paper adds to the literature on activism and social movements by offering a more complex picture of the spatial politics at work in social movements and a better understanding of individual action and mobilisation. Drawing on an anarchist perspective on activism, it suggests that activism and everyday life should not be studied in isolation from each other but as mutually constitutive in the creation of everyday alternative spaces – hemeratopias.

Journal of Social Philosophy, 2022

Veganism is commonly described as the attempt to avoid, as far as possible, the exploitation and consumption of animals and animal products. While some people choose the plant-based diet associated with veganism for health or other self-interested reasons, the majority of philosophical work on the topic has been devoted to discussion of the ethical justification of veganism (i.e., to 'ethical veganism'). Some argue that it is a moral imperative if we take the rights or interests of animals seriously (e.g., Francione & Charlton, 2013; Mason & Singer, 1980). Others regard it as a necessity if we are to live up to our duties to live as sustainably as possible (Fox, 2000), or to minimize public health risks (Melina et al., 2016; Vyas, 2019; Walker et al., 2005). Still others hold that it is supported by religious and spiritual reasons (Kemmerer, 2012). These justifications are, of course, not mutually exclusive. And yet, others have questioned whether moral concern for animals really does entail a vegan diet (Davis, 2003 (on field deaths), but cf.

Food and Foodways, 2019

In a qualitative content analysis of The Vegan Society’s quarterly publication, The Vegan, spanning 73 years and nearly 300 issues, the trajectory of one of the world’s most radical and compassionate counter cuisine collectives is presented and critically assessed. The Vegan Society’s history provides a case study on the ways in which social movements negotiate difference and conflict. Specifically, this article highlights the challenges of identity, professionalization, and factionalism across the 20th and 21st centuries. This research also puts into perspective the cultural impact that veganism has had on Western society, namely the dramatic increase in vegan consumers, vegan products, and the normalcy of vegan nutrition.