Veganism and the climate crisis: Everyday online spaces of sustainability

Abstract

The IPCC’s 2023 Sixth Assessment Report calls for immediate and drastic climate action to be taken in order to avoid irreversible planetary damage. These increasing concerns for climate change require similarly radical changes in food systems (Lonkila and Kaljonen, 2021), with a mass transition to plant-based eating to ameliorate emissions offering one potential option (IPCC, 2019; Willett, Rockstrom et al., 2019). Such consumption trends have global impacts (Radnitz, Beezhold et al., 2015) yet academic enquiry into veganism remains emergent, as do the tensions between “plant-based eating” and veganism.

While widely recognised that veganism is more than just a diet, recent mainstreaming of vegan food consumption has led to a focus on the individual human body, particularly around health, beauty and appearance, as opposed to broader socio-environmental ethics and politics. Thus, the contemporary focus on veganism, albeit often framed as ‘plant-based’, depoliticises previously core concerns around animal ethics and exploitation. In contrast, the governance emphasis on the environmental benefits from vegan practice in relation to practitioners’ lived experiences and representations of veganism remain underexplored, particularly in online spaces.

Online spaces and social media are a key domain for the construction and contestation of contemporary vegan identities. Previous research has explored representations of veganism in print media (Cole and Morgan, 2011; Morris 2018), but online spaces are underexamined. They vary in multiple ways from traditional print media, through foregrounding the voices of divergent actors, enabling a performative role in creating identities (Albu and Etter, 2015), as well as shaping contemporary debates on veganism. We focus on the work these actants, and the different social media platforms, do which enable ‘authors’ to create immediate and affective content outside of formal restrictive systems, developing relationships with the technology and their audiences in constructing socio-material narratives of veganism. We thus respond to Goodman and Jaworska’s (2020) call for more empirical research that explores the dominant voices who inhabit these digital foodscapes, and who shape our relationship with the contemporary food system.

Our research offers an original exploration of online representations of veganism, the tensions in such spaces around ‘plant-based eating,’ and how such positions are framed in relation to climate change and environmental crises. Our analysis of vegan identities as represented on social media, offers an understanding of how veganism is portrayed to (and by) citizens/consumers/activists, and offers insights into the ways in which socio-environmental ethics are deployed in mainstream vegan discourses, thereby contributing to growing literature on digital food geographies.