Abstract
In Great Britain, “religion or belief” is one of nine “protected characteristics” under the Equality Act 2010, which protects citizens from discrimination in the workplace and in wider society. This paper begins with a discussion about a 2020 ruling, “Jordi Casamitjana vs. LACS”, which concluded that ethical vegans are entitled to similar legal protections in British workplaces as those who hold philosophical religious beliefs. While not all vegans hold a philosophical belief to the same extent as Casamitjana, the ruling is significant and will be of interest to scholars investigating non-religious ethical beliefs. To explore this, we have analysed a sample of YouTube videos on the theme of “my vegan story”, showing how vloggers circulate narratives about ethical veganism and the process of their conversion to vegan beliefs and practices. The story format can be understood as what Abby Day has described as a performative “belief narrative”, offering a greater opportunity to understand research participants’ beliefs and related identities than, for example, findings from a closed-question survey. We suggest that through performative acts, YouTubers create “ethical beliefs” through the social, mediatised, transformative, performative and relational practice of their digital content. In doing so, we incorporate a digital perspective to enrich academic discussions of non-religious beliefs.
Highlights
In January 2020, an employment tribunal in England ruled that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief that is protected by law against discrimination
Our research far suggests that ethical belief is a promising area of enquiry for scholars to explore the complexities of the non-religious category
Of the media, as Hjarvard contends (Hjarvard 2008, p. 9), there exists the scope to develop more fully how the complexity of non-religion is shaped by processes of mediatisation
Summary
In January 2020, an employment tribunal in England ruled that ethical veganism is a philosophical belief that is protected by law against discrimination. The criteria for determining a philosophical belief, in the words of the 2010 Equality Act, are that “it must be genuinely held; be a belief and not an opinion or viewpoint based on the present state of information available; be a belief as to a weighty and substantial aspect of human life and behaviour; attain a certain licenses/by/4.0/) For discussion of this and other legal cases involving religion, see Abby Day (2020): Sociology of Religion, Overview and Analysis of Contemporary. The way YouTubers talk about self-education and “making the connection” is crucial to how these vloggers become vegan; the formation of an ethical belief is shown to be a mediatised, transformative, performative and relational practice This supports the view that emotional forms of belief are significant evidence of non-religious beliefs replacing institutional and civil forms of religion in Euro-American contexts Call for Day’s work to be developed using the dimension of mediatization— the nature of performativity and sociality when relationships are mediated digitally
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