‘Beyond Meat & Memes’: New research project examines how veganism is promoted on social media
'Beyond Meat & Memes' is an academic research project funded by a British Academy. The project investigates what kinds of strategies and tactics are being used to spread messages promoting veganism and plant-based lifestyles. It specifically looks at how increasingly dominant video and image-based media are used on Instagram and TikTok.
COREY WRENN: Social media has become central to many people’s everyday communication, education, and self-expression. Such platforms are undeniably significant in informing and shaping many prominent issues. We launched the Beyond Meat & Memes project to explore how the promotion of veganism functions online. In particular, we focused on Instagram and TikTok to better understand how the combination of text, image, and video work together. We explored the strategies, narratives, and messages which were most prominent during Veganuary 2024.
We found three main discourses. The first discourse displayed “animals are subjects”… This discourse was also presented through more subtle challenges to speciesism such as in a video of a human being stroking a cow who is purring like a cat… A second discourse construed “veganism as care”. This set of posts often represented people caring for non-human animals or rescuing them from being farmed, abused, or slaughtered… The final discourse represented “veganism as vibrant”…These show vegan food as colourful, diverse, and delicious with the subjects of videos having fun preparing and enjoying the food…
The findings from Beyond Meat & Memes were much more extensive than it has been possible to represent here. For instance, we looked in detail at the kinds of subjectivities constructed for both human and non-human animals, rhetorical strategies, and specific uses of the affordances of the platforms. You can read more about the project on our website and publications from the project will be coming soon. SOURCE…
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