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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Marta Wilczek-WatsonORCiD
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With meat and dairy consumption increasingly reported as being unethical and negatively impacting both theenvironment and our health, a heated discussion around alternative lifestyles unfolds, veganism being one ofthem. As social media create a powerful platform for debating any contentious issue, it is unsurprising that vegan discourses penetrate this online space. To analyse these discourses, in this talk we look at veganism-related interactions on Facebook and YouTube to interrogate various linguistic and semiotic representations of vegan-ism in these key social media. Specifically, we focus on the online interactions in response to Kate Taunton’s doc-umentary series “Veganville” (BBC1, January 2020), in which a group of activists runs a pro-veganism campaign in Merthyr Tydfil – a town in South Wales with a strong tradition of animal agriculture. Through a qualitativemultimodal discourse analysis, we explore recurrent online depictions of vegan lifestyle by its propagators andopponents to better understand the interactive patterns of this polemic in the British context. We capture not only pro-vegan and anti-vegan discourses in this online debate, but also transcend this dichotomy by including ambivalent reactions to the documentary from vegans and their negotiation of the vegan spectrum. The analysis complements previous studies into vegan discourses in press and in social media, by focusing on online responses to a vegan TV campaign and thus examining vegan talk across various media platforms. Addressing the conference theme, the analysis moves beyond the linguistic to offer insights into the affordances of social media to reflect, shape and research public debates in relation to food commodities – one of the largest industries and the most burning issues worldwide.Reference:Veganville (2020) [TV Programme] BBC1.
Author(s): Wilczek-Watson M, Brickley K
Publication type: Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstract)
Publication status: Published
Conference Name: Sociolinguistics Symposium 23
Year of Conference: 2021
Pages: 406-406
Acceptance date: 01/03/2021
URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NahlALizch7g9oCgbI_4ihjYtvIqBu5R/view
