Cultures, Politics and Histories of Vegan Practice

Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre (ShARC) welcome Dr Catherine Oliver and Dr Eva Haifa Giraud to discuss their new books exploring the cultures, politics and histories of vegan practice, followed by an audience Q&A.

Catherine Oliver is a geographer and postdoctoral researcher, currently working on the ERC-funded Urban Ecologies project at the University of Cambridge. Her current research with backyard chickens and chicken-keepers in London asks how we can rethink the city from beyond-human perspectives. Her first monograph, Veganism, Animals, and Archives is forthcoming with Routledge in 2021. Catherine is a Wiley-Royal Geographical Society Digital Archives Fellow, exploring the geographical archive for stories of animal collaboration, labour, and conflict. She can be found on twitter at @katiecmoliver and catherinecmoliver.wordpress.com.

Her forthcoming book, Veganism, Archives, and Animals (Routledge) explores the growing significance of veganism, bringing together important theoretical and empirical insights to offer a historical and contemporary analysis of veganism and our future co-existence with other animals.

Bringing together key concepts from geography, critical animal studies and feminist theory this book critically addresses veganism as both a subject of study and a spatial approach to the self, society, and everyday life. The book draws upon empirical research in the archives of Richard D Ryder, from interviews with vegans in Britain, and from a multispecies ethnography with chickens. The book argues that the field of ‘beyond-human geographies’ needs to more seriously take into account veganism as a rising socio-political force, and in academic theory. This book provides a timely contribution to debates within animal studies and more-than-human geographies on the complexities of caring beyond the human.

Eva Haifa Giraud is a senior lecturer in Media at Keele University. Her research has two strands. In empirical terms, she is interested in the ways that activists negotiate tensions associated with the media platforms they use, particularly the challenges posed by social media. She also has a broad conceptual interest in non-anthropocentric theoretical work, which explores ways of thinking and acting in the world that move beyond the treatment of (some) humans as exceptional. Her publications include What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, anthropocentrism and an ethics of exclusion (Duke University Press) and articles in journals such as Theory, Culture & Society, New Media & Society and Social Studies of Science.

In her forthcoming book, Veganism: Politics, Practice and Theory (Bloomsbury Academic), Eva Haifa Giraud offers an accessible route into the debates that surround vegan politics, which feed into broader issues surrounding food activism and social justice. Giraud engages with arguments in favor of veganism, as well as the criticisms levelled at vegan politics. She interrogates debates and topics that are central to conversations around veganism, including identity, intersectional politics, and activism, with research drawn from literary animal studies, animal geographies, ecofeminism, posthumanism, critical race theory, and new materialism.

Giraud makes an original theoretical intervention into these often fraught debates, and argues that veganism holds radical political potential to act as “more than a diet” by disrupting commonplace norms and assumptions about how humans relate to animals. Drawing on a range of examples, from recipe books with punk aesthetics to social media campaigns, Giraud shows how veganism's radical potential is being complicated by its commercialization, and elucidates new conceptual frameworks for reclaiming veganism as a radical social movement.