Kai Aotearoa seminar series – 6 September 2023

Seminar 1
Kapa Kaiota: Intersectional Vegan Studies in Aotearoa New Zealand

Professor Annie Potts, Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies

For students and researchers of human-animal relationships, the words ‘vegan’ and ‘veganism’ have begun to function not only as the descriptors of a practice – a way of living and being in the world – but also as critical terms. In this regard, ‘vegan’ and ‘veganism’ refer to a particular kind of conceptual approach, one characterised by an ethical and political commitment to the identification, analysis and rejection – as far as possible – of the ideologies that justify and enable the exploitation of nonhuman animals. In addition, veganism, both as a practice and a critical method, increasingly tends to combine with ‘intersectional’ forms of thinking, which aim to recognize the ways in which human-animal relations are intricately linked with the politics of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, class, and physical ability and disability. This presentation will introduce key theories of veganism, placing particular emphasis on new critical thinking emerging from Intersectional Vegan Studies. Special attention will also be paid to representations of meat and its consumption (as well as meat and dairy refusal and veganism) – phenomena that should be central to any thoroughgoing understanding of food futures, both in Aotearoa and around the world.

Annie Potts is Professor of Critical Animal Studies and Co-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies at Te Whare Wānanga o Waitaha/University of Canterbury. She has a background in critical psychology, sexuality and gender studies, cultural studies and Critical Animal Studies. Annie is the author of The Science/Fiction of Sex: Feminist Deconstruction and the Vocabularies of Heterosex (Routledge, 2002) and Chicken (Reaktion Animal Series, 2012) and co-author (with Philip Armstrong and Deidre Brown) of A New Zealand Book of Beasts: Animals in our Culture, History and Everyday Life (AUP, 2013) and (with Donelle Gadenne) of Animals in Emergencies: Learning from the Christchurch Earthquakes (CUP, 2014), and editor of Meat Culture (Brill, 2016). She is currently completing a book for Sydney University’s Animal Politics series on the cultural and political histories of possums, from the Americas to Oceania. Annie has published on carnism, and its opposite veganism, in a number of academic domains.

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