VLS webinar
This virtual workshop offers a venue for international research scholars with an interest in Critical Vegan Studies - specifically in the fields of literature, film and media, and theory - to meet and exchange. The workshop features both work-in-progress sessions and guided readings of key theoretical texts.
Details of each meeting, including the Zoom link and any preliminary readings, are shared via a mailing list. To join the mailing list, please send a request to Professor Deborah Madsen (deborah.madsen@unige.ch), including your contact details and a brief academic biography.
SCHEDULE
4 June at 19h CET (via Zoom)
Book Talk with Corey Lee Wrenn, University of Kent, UK
She will join us to discuss her latest book, Vegan Witchcraft: Contemporary Magical Practice and Multispecies Social Change (Routledge 2026). You can listen to her conversation about the book with Rayane Laddi on The Vegan Report podcast (https://open.spotify.com/episode/6Q9iRcpcXfxWQXWHEwT5Si) and her presentation "Why Witchcraft is Vegan Feminist in Practice" is on her YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCqW27HgMp4 or the shorter presentation "What is Vegan Witchcraft?" is on "The Vegan Witch" channel at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CggQ-H_Ry1c&t=17s. Her review of Alph Ko's Racism as Zoological Witchcraft (2019) is here: https://www.coreyleewrenn.com/Pubs/WRENN-2020-Breaking-the-Spell.pdf
30 April 2026 @19h CET (via Zoom)
Ho’esta Mo’e’hahne, UCLA
Indigenous and Non-Abrahamic Ethical Approaches to Veganism
Following our March discussion of Donna Haraway's crypto-carnist theorizing, in our next meeting we turn our attention to ethical vegan thought beyond the paradigm that is promoted and sustained by the legacy of Abrahamic religions, like Corey Lee Wrenn's recent work on "vegan witchcraft" (Routledge 2026 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032649801) and Indigenous theorists working in the emergent area that Margaret Robinson (Lennox Island First Nation) characterizes as "Indigenous veganism" (see Robinson, “Indigenous Veganism.” In Y. Athanassakis et al. (eds.), The Plant-based and Vegan Handbook (Springer 2024 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63083-5_19).
The texts on which we will focus are the following (available in Open Access):
- Billy-Ray Belcourt, "Animal Bodies, Colonial Subjects: (Re)Locating Animality in Decolonial Thought" Societies 5 (2015): 1–11. doi:10.3390/soc5010001
- Margaret Robinson, "Animal Personhood in Mi’kmaq Perspective" Societies 4 (2014): 672-688. doi:10.3390/soc4040672
- Kim TallBear, "Why Interspecies Thinking Needs Indigenous Standpoints" Fieldsights (18 November 2011): n.pag. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/why-interspecies-thinking-needs-indigenous-standpoints
- Corey Lee Wrenn, "Introducing Vegan Witchcraft" Pagan Dawn 238 (2026): 28-29. Kent Academic Repository. https://kar.kent.ac.uk/112965/3/Corey%20Wrenn%20-%202025%20-%20Introducing%20Vegan%20Witchcraft%20-%20Pagan%20Dawn.pdf
24 March 2026 @ 19h CET (via Zoom)
Continuing the conversation around Veganism, Queerness, and Disability introduced by Anna James, in this session we will focus on the spectral presence of Donna Haraway that haunts so many of the chapters in Messy Eating: Conversations on Animals as Food (2019) by reading Haraway and considering critiques of her work, specifically the following:
- Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003. https://xenopraxis.net/readings/haraway_companion.pdf
- Zipporah Weisberg, "The Broken Promises of Monsters: Haraway, Animals and the Humanist Legacy" Journal for Critical Animal Studies VII. II (2009): 22-62. https://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/Zipporah-Wesiberg-pg.-22-62.pdf
- Poornima Rajeshwar and Naisargi Davé, "On ‘Indifference’: A Conversation with Naisargi Davé" Member Voices, Fieldsights (16 September 2025): n.pag. https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/interview-naisargi-n-dav%C3%A9-on-conceptualizing-and-writing-indifference-winner-of-the-2024-gregory-bateson-book-prize
Veganism, Queerness, and Disability
Where does veganism intersect queerness and disability, and what do these intersections mean for vegan theorizing, vegan literary studies, and everyday vegan practice? Though veganism is, like queerness and disability, often treated as nothing more than a siloed and commodifiable identity, how might foregrounding their intersection(s) invite broader shifts in our critical thought? I’m thinking about the way veganism may be intimately entangled with our personal histories, identities, and quotidian activities. I’m thinking also about Robert McRuer’s notion of compulsory able-bodiedness, and the way normativity of many stripes is enforced through rhetorics of health, nutrition, and the "proper" body. And I’m thinking as well about the care webs described by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and how veganism might be part of the care work we perform. In a word, what shapes does veganism take as an intersectional foodway, one inextricable from—and so capable of shedding critical light on— gender, race, nation, sexuality, dis/ability, and class?
5. Vegetarianism in the Fiction of Women's Liberation (Anna James, Franklin College): SLIDES
6. Animal Abstinence in the Anthropocene (Bryn Skibo, Vancouver Island University): SLIDES
7. 'Pity the meat!': Ideology, Metaphor, Violence (Aïcha Bouchelaghem, University of Geneva): SLIDES
2. Pythagoreans or, Vegetarians before "Vegetarianism" (Arvind Thomas, UCLA)
3. Vegetarianism and the Utopian Novel (Dan Abitz, Emory University): SLIDES
Last updated on April 1st, 2026
SNSF project 100015_204481
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