From the Dinner Table to the Ballot Box: Tracing Political Vegan Identity Through Everyday Practice and Digital Media
(2026) MKVM13 20261Media and Communication Studies
Department of Communication and Media
- Abstract
- This thesis examines how individuals form and enact political vegan identity through everyday practice, and the role digital media platforms play in mediating that process. Drawing on 12 semi-structured interviews with vegan participants across 4 groups defined by age and length of vegan practice – New Sprouts, Early Roots, Late Bloomers, and The Oakes – the study traces the specific processes through which private dietary choices become sites of sustained political meaning-making.
The findings demonstrate that political identity is not adopted in a single moment of ideological conviction, but assembled gradually through the interplay of structural conditions, social relationships, and the interpretive environment that digital media... (More) - This thesis examines how individuals form and enact political vegan identity through everyday practice, and the role digital media platforms play in mediating that process. Drawing on 12 semi-structured interviews with vegan participants across 4 groups defined by age and length of vegan practice – New Sprouts, Early Roots, Late Bloomers, and The Oakes – the study traces the specific processes through which private dietary choices become sites of sustained political meaning-making.
The findings demonstrate that political identity is not adopted in a single moment of ideological conviction, but assembled gradually through the interplay of structural conditions, social relationships, and the interpretive environment that digital media provides. The transition to veganism depends on a favorable choice architecture that makes ethical action practically possible: for younger participants, this was often enabled by gaining residential autonomy upon entering university; for others, it was mediated by the proximate influence of vegan social networks. In both cases, the identity label typically arrived after the practice rather than before it, consolidating a process already underway.
Social media's role in this process is neither static nor uniform. During the early stages of vegan identity formation, platforms function as cognitive scaffolding, providing the symbolic and emotional resources through which dietary choices acquire political meaning. As identity matures, however, this dependence recedes. Long-term practitioners turn to platforms as practical everyday utilities rather than as environments for identity work, a shift that mirrors the broader movement from explicit activism toward quiet, everyday integration.
In the domain of consumption, political vegan identity finds its most durable expression, expanding in scope from vegan product categories toward brand ethics, labor conditions, and geopolitical entanglement as experience deepens. Yet when consumption is positioned as a primary mode of political participation, economic inequality translates directly into inequality in political capacity — a structural tension the existing framework does not fully address. Beyond the marketplace, the same ethical commitments extend coherently into formal political participation through value coherence rather than direct media influence, suggesting that veganism functions less as a single-issue lifestyle and more as an integrative ethical orientation through which multiple domains of civic life are navigated. (Less)
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@misc{9228921,
abstract = {{This thesis examines how individuals form and enact political vegan identity through everyday practice, and the role digital media platforms play in mediating that process. Drawing on 12 semi-structured interviews with vegan participants across 4 groups defined by age and length of vegan practice – New Sprouts, Early Roots, Late Bloomers, and The Oakes – the study traces the specific processes through which private dietary choices become sites of sustained political meaning-making.
The findings demonstrate that political identity is not adopted in a single moment of ideological conviction, but assembled gradually through the interplay of structural conditions, social relationships, and the interpretive environment that digital media provides. The transition to veganism depends on a favorable choice architecture that makes ethical action practically possible: for younger participants, this was often enabled by gaining residential autonomy upon entering university; for others, it was mediated by the proximate influence of vegan social networks. In both cases, the identity label typically arrived after the practice rather than before it, consolidating a process already underway.
Social media's role in this process is neither static nor uniform. During the early stages of vegan identity formation, platforms function as cognitive scaffolding, providing the symbolic and emotional resources through which dietary choices acquire political meaning. As identity matures, however, this dependence recedes. Long-term practitioners turn to platforms as practical everyday utilities rather than as environments for identity work, a shift that mirrors the broader movement from explicit activism toward quiet, everyday integration.
In the domain of consumption, political vegan identity finds its most durable expression, expanding in scope from vegan product categories toward brand ethics, labor conditions, and geopolitical entanglement as experience deepens. Yet when consumption is positioned as a primary mode of political participation, economic inequality translates directly into inequality in political capacity — a structural tension the existing framework does not fully address. Beyond the marketplace, the same ethical commitments extend coherently into formal political participation through value coherence rather than direct media influence, suggesting that veganism functions less as a single-issue lifestyle and more as an integrative ethical orientation through which multiple domains of civic life are navigated.}},
author = {{Wang, Rui}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{From the Dinner Table to the Ballot Box: Tracing Political Vegan Identity Through Everyday Practice and Digital Media}},
year = {{2026}},
}