Mediation for affect : coming to care about factory-farmed animals
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Media International Australia Vol. 165, no. 1 (2017), p. 37-50
- Full Text:
- Reviewed:
- Description: In this article, we examine the digitalised emotional campaigning of one of Australia’s peak animal welfare body, Animals Australia, focusing on their most effective digital strategies associated with their campaigns against factory farming. Our broader interest lies with sounding out the affective affordances of the technologies informing such activist work; technologies of affect in a very significant sense. This discussion comprises three parts. First, we unpack the context for the problematic faced by animal and environmental activisms: neoliberalism, showing how neoliberal assumptions constrain such activisms to emotional appeals and denounce them for such strategising. Second, we sound out some of the affordances of digital media technologies for affectively oriented activisms; and finally, we delve into some of Animals Australia’s digital campaigning with regard to issues of factory farming in order to show the efficacy of such affectively oriented mediated strategising for the forming of new relations with factory farm. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
Becoming activist : The mediation of consumers in Animals Australia’s Make it Possible campaign
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Media International Australia Vol. 172, no. 1 (2019), p. 48-60
- Full Text: false
- Reviewed:
- Description: In 2008, the Australian Law Reform Commission journal, Reform, called out animal welfare as Australia’s ‘next great social justice movement’ in 2018; however, public mobilisation around animal welfare is still a contested issue in Australia. The question stands as to how to mobilise everyday mainstream consumers into supporting animal activism given that animal activism is presented in the public sphere as dampening the economic livelihood of Australia, with some animal activism described as ‘akin to terrorism’. The questions, then, are as follows: how to mobilise everyday mainstream consumers into supporting animal activist ideals? How to frame and communicate animal activist ideals so that they can come to inform and change the behaviour and self-understandings of mainstream consumers? This article is an investigation into the possible production and mobilisation of animal activists from mainstream consumers through the work of one digital campaign, Make it Possible. Delivered by the peak Australian animal advocacy organisation, Animals Australia, and explicitly targeting the lived experiences and conditions of animals in factory farming, Make it Possible reached nearly 12 million viewers across Australia and has directly impacted on the reported behaviour and self-understandings of over 291,000 Australians to date, as well as impacting policy decisions made by government and industry. More specifically, our interest is to engage a new materialist lens to draw out how this campaign operates to transform consumers into veg*ns (vegans/vegetarians), activists and ethical consumers who materially commit to and live revised beliefs regarding human–animal relations.
Animals Australia and the challenges of vegan stereotyping
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: M/C Journal Vol. 22, no. 2 (2019), p.
- Full Text:
- Reviewed:
- Description: Negative stereotyping of alternative diets such as veganism and other plant-based diets has been common in Australia, conventionally a meat-eating culture (OECD qtd. in Ting). Indeed, meat consumption in Australia is sanctioned by the ubiquity of advertising linking meat-eating to health, vitality and nation-building, and public challenges to such plant-based diets as veganism. In addition, state, commercial enterprises, and various community groups overtly resist challenges to Australian meat-eating norms and to the intensive animal husbandry practices that underpin it. Hence activists, who may contest not simply this norm but many of the customary industry practices that comprise Australia’s meat production, have been accused of promoting a vegan agenda and even of undermining the “Australian way of life”...