Given the fact that being vegan is generally considered odd or deviant from the mainstream norms of carnism, we examine how vegans manage such social positioning in their dealings with omnivores. This article employs a discursive analysis of vegans’ narratives of problematic moments with omnivores and how they manage such situations and their identity. The vegans’ narratives ranged from problem stories where some troublesome event occurred, but was not resolved, to solution stories of the best ways of dealing with meat eaters. In each case, being vegan is a social positioning that is problematized in various ways and a positioning that needs to be accounted for. The narrators give voice to themselves or others through the discursive practices of metadiscourse and reported speech in constructing the problem story. Vegans face the ideological dilemma in how to speak about their veganism as choice of diet, for environmental reasons or ethical considerations.

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Abstract:Using a critical analytic lens, this essay examines how race, racism, and race relations depicted in the movie Crash reflect complicity, coherence, and implicature. The essay first utilizes complicity theory to offer a critical analysis of the film, then provides a thematic analysis of student reactions to the film as a means of gaining insight into multiple possible readings of the film. The analysis demonstrates how a simultaneous, multilayered experience of complicity, coherence, and implicature functions as a process of mediation for the viewing audience.

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As the pandemic of COVID-19 shut down the world and people were ordered to stay home and social distance from each other, the world turned to social media to share all sorts of information about the pandemic and related topics, giving rise to infodemic or ‘an over-abundance of information – some accurate and some not – that makes it hard for people to find trustworthy sources and reliable guidance when they need it’ (WHO 2020: 2). Besides the overwhelming amount of information about the virus and its treatment, COVID-19 infodemic includes a copious volume of information about the environment. Many of the stories that spread on social media reported improvements to the environment, and this was attributed to human absence. This article will reflect on these stories and their implications from an ecological perspective with several questions in mind: how is the environment constructed in social media in relation to the pandemic, and what are their implications?; what may be overlooked in the infodemic on the environment, and why does that matter? My reflection addresses and problematizes the prevalence of dualism in the ways the environment is constructed in the widespread environmental stories in the context of the pandemic.