page_title: Vegan studies
section_title: Entry into the academy
hierarchical_section_title: Vegan studies / Development / Entry into the academy
caption_attribution_description: English: Carol J. Adams speaks at the Intersectional Justice Conference at the Whidbey Institute.
context_page_description: Vegan studies is the study, within the humanities and social sciences, of veganism 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, it seeks to establish veganism as a "mode of thinking and writing", a "means of critique", and "a new lens for ecocritical textual analysis". Vegan studies is closely related to critical animal studies.
  Working within a variety of disciplines, scholars in the field discuss issues such as the commodity status of animals; carnism; veganism and ecofeminism; veganism and race; varieties of veganism; and the effect of animal farming on climate change. Because the field is new, its parameters are unclear; vegan studies or vegan theory can be informed by animal studies, critical race theory, environmental studies and ecocriticism, feminist theory, postcolonialism, posthumanism, and queer theory, incorporating a range of empirical and non-empirical research methodologies.
context_section_description: In the 1990s and 2000s, several works informed the later development of vegan studies. Described as one of the field's foundational texts, Carol J. Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (1990) linked vegetarianism directly to feminism. She argued 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 (1992); Colin Spencer's The Heretic's Feast (1996); Tristram Stuart's The Bloodless Revolution (2006); and Rod Preece's Sins of the Flesh (2008).
   In December 2013, in the journal PhaenEx, media scholar Eva Giraud discussed the relationship of veganism to animal studies, ecofeminism and posthumanism. Academic work on veganism appeared in Nick Taylor and Richard Twine's 2014 collection, The Rise of Critical Animal Studies, and in December that year, Emilia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood addressed a workshop at the University of York, organized by the art historian Jason Edwards, to discuss "the fast developing field of vegan theory".
  Quinn and Westwood write that veganism's "entry into the academy" began around 2010. Shortly after the publication that year of her collection Sistah Vegan, A. Breeze Harper announced a new "critical race and veg*n studies intersect" research group on her website, The Sistah Vegan Project, and was working on "applications of critical race and black feminist studies to vegan studies in the US". Also in 2010, 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". They included an essay by Harper, "Race as a 'Feeble Matter' in Veganism".
caption: Carol J. Adams's The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) became influential within vegan studies.
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