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This presentation articulates a vegan feminist pedagogical framework that educators can use to help students think critically about the intersections of animal ethics and eco-social justice. This work contributes to the growing discourse on ecofeminist pedagogy (Houde and Bullis, 1999), ecopedagogy (Kahn, 2010), and critical animal pedagogy (Nocella, 2019). I offer insights rooted in what I call an integral feminist pedagogy (Arora, 2017), a framework that integrates the affective, intellectual, and political dimensions of teaching and learning. The framework I develop in this paper is based on the following teaching experiences: courses that are specifically focused on animal ethics within humanities programs; courses that add a vegan and anti- speciesist lens to the study of feminism; and public workshops and presentations that examine the interconnections of social justice and animal liberation. The integral vegan feminist pedagogy I posit here includes several dimension. First, it draws upon a post-essentialist feminist care ethic (Tronto, 1993) to help students reflect on their relationships with nonhuman animals. Second, this care ethic is integrated with trauma-informed pedagogies (Carello and Butler, 2014) to help educators attend to the emotional and mental impact on students of learning about the immensity of human-generated animal suffering. In particular, vegan educators must address what Mann (2018) calls vystopia, the existential despair that may arise from the recognition of the enormity of cruelty in our food system. Thus, educators who introduce vegan content into the classroom must be equipped with strategies to facilitate students’ ability to process and make meaning of what they are learning. Third, an integral vegan feminist perspective highlights epistemologies of interconnection by linking the struggles of humans and nonhumans. It challenges students to think beyond anthropocentric concepts of social justice and recognize the linkages among racism, sexism/heterosexism, ableism, and speciesism. In order to do this, vegan educators must surface and deconstruct common preconceptions that veganism is the purview of only the white and privileged. Fourth, and relatedly, an integral vegan feminist pedagogy challenges Eurocentrism by highlighting non-Western, Indigenous, and decolonial philosophies in which nonhuman animals are understood not as objects but as sacred kin to humans (Kemmerer, 2012; Robinson, 2014). Finally, an integral vegan feminist pedagogy addresses the complexity of feminist issues connected to food, including issues of personal agency, body image, and fatphobia. Given the pervasiveness of disordered eating and body image issues among diverse women, non-gender conforming people (and, increasingly, men), classroom discussions of veganism can trigger concerns around food restriction, body shaming, and stereotypical gender norms. Media images that conflate veganism with thin, Eurocentric beauty standards contribute to this problem, as do problematic conflations of veganism with disordered eating (Wright, 2015). Integral vegan educators must therefore bring to the classroom a critical examination of media biases while also highlighting vegan scholars and activists of diverse body types. Most importantly, they must help students re-frame veganism as a personal and ethical commitment rather than a diet or lifestyle choice. Alka Arora(California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) Program in Women, Gender, Comments are closed.
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