Mediating lifestyle movements: the ethical ecologies of digital veganisms

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article sets out a framework, ‘ethical ecologies,’ for researching and conceptualizing the role of media in lifestyle movements. Understanding lifestyle movements is important due to their growing prominence as a site of ethical and political agency, and media are integral in materializing this agency. The framework I develop to research these movements combines three bodies of work: media ecological scholarship (which emphasizes relations between media and social contexts), app studies (which foregrounds the mediation of consumption practices), and feminist STS (which elucidates how infrastructures materialize ethical possibilities). Using digital veganism as a case study, I combine interviews, documentary analysis, participatory action research, and what I describe as a ‘historicized’ app walkthrough, to trace how the move away from grassroots activist-produced media – and widespread use of apps and social media to support vegan practice – is entangled with its dramatic popularization. Yet, while veganism more visible, its position as a holistic philosophy with connections to wider social movements has been troubled by a socio-technical emphasis on vegan eating practice. Through this analysis of digital veganisms, I elucidate how an ethical ecologies approach can be utilized to reveal shifts in the mediation of lifestyle movements that have profound ethico-political implications.