Driving Question: How does veganism create ethical conflicts within cultural and religious communities?
Reflection #1
In the exploration of your topic, did you change your topic, your driving question, universal theme,or generalizations? Why did you change those elements, or why did you not change them?
In the beginning we our topic was Diversity and stereotypes in Hollywood. Our universal theme was Power but after we decided to change it to Community. We changed the theme because the generalizations for Power didn’t make sense for the topic but the generalizations for Community did. After we decided to try to change our whole topic. We changed our topic because the topic got boring for us. We chose another topic that was inspired by a TED talk. The video was named the danger of a single story and the speaker was Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. This video was about how people only know one side of an idea, thing, or person and not the whole entire story. This video relates to the phrase “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. Our team is deciding if we want to do this topic or choose another topic. We are trying to find an interesting topic that we all like. We also want a topic that grabs people’s attention.
Reflection #2
Now that you are in the Student-Led Research part of the process, which student-led research option are you doing?(survey,interview of an expert, observation, experiment) Why?
What has been easy and what has been difficult about this process?
We did an observation/experiment for our Student-Led research. Since our topic is on veganism and how it disrespects culture and religious communities, we decided to become vegan. We decided that a week would be the best to be vegan because it is so difficult to know what you can and can’t eat. The purpose of this experiment/observation is to see the reactions of family and friends when we told them that we were vegan. I didn’t tell anyone that being vegan was for a school project. I just told them that I was vegan and that this was my new lifestyle. I got many reactions like why would I do this. How are you going to eat bacon? You're crazy. What are you going to eat? You are going to faint of starvation. My mom even screamed at me because I didn’t eat right away in the morning. The most difficult part was trying to find something that I could eat. My family is a meat eating family so they ate foods that I couldn’t eat. It was hard to watch my family eat foods that I couldn’t eat because I wanted to eat that food. It was also telling people that I was vegan because I didn’t know what their reactions would be.
Reflection #3
We wanted our background to connect to the ethics of veganism. So we did an ethics icon in the middle. Instead of the original black and white we decided to make one side green and one side red. The green side was a collage of green fruits and vegetables and the red side was a collage of red raw meat. Since our universal theme is community we decided to make the border with little people holding hands representing a community. Then in the middle where the little people were holding hands we put many religious symbols so it would connect to our driving question of How does veganism create ethical conflicts within cultural and religious communities? For the artistic piece our team wants to do a refrigerator and in the inside there is going to be something symbolic relating to veganism and the religious/cultural communities. To successfully complete our artistic component I think we evenly divide the work among us three. I think that we are all working well together. The only problem was getting everyone to work on the Information Synthesis document.
Reflection #4
My driving question is: How does veganism create ethical conflicts within cultural and religious communities? Some revisions we made were adding my week as a vegan to each of our diary entries. I learned that there is two types of vegans. One type of a vegan is a punk vegan. A punk vegan is a vegan that strictly follows the vegan diet. A non-punk vegan is a vegan that eats the vegan diet but still uses clothing and animal products that are made from or tested on animals. Our student-led research was a observation/experiment. My experience was good and bad. Becoming vegan for a week had its pros and cons. I did feel better after I ate like a vegan person. It was kind of hard because I didn’t know what to eat. My mom screamed at me because I didn’t eat the food she was making. She said that she was going to take to the doctor if I didn’t eat. She was concerned for my health and she didn’t want me to be vegan. I think that we did good on the collaborative piece. Our collaborative piece was a refrigerator with a vegan and a non-vegan puzzle. It showed two sides the vegan side and the non vegan side. When we presented we gave out vegan and non vegan cookies and had people guess which one was vegan.
Information Synthesis Document and Student-Led Research Results
References:
(2014) Eating Animals: Addressing Our Most Common Justifications
http://freefromharm.org/eating-animals-addressing-our-most-common-justifications/
Hunt, C. (2010) Vegan Values, Religious Rights: A Cultural Critique of Entrenched Ethics
http://www.lclark.edu/live/files/6665-vegan-values-religious-rights
Heuchan, C. (2015)Veganism has a serious race problem
https://mediadiversified.org/2015/12/16/veganism-has-a-serious-race-problem/
Cherry,E. (2006) Veganism as a Cultural Movement: A Relational Approach
https://foodethics.univie.ac.at
Young, N. (2016) Why the Vegan Diet is Pretty Disrespectful
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nzinga-young/veggan_b_9205340.html
Reynolds, L. ; Rodgers, A. ; Sutherland, M. (2015) Veganism in American Culture
http://foodwaysinfocus.leadr.msu.edu/fall-2015/veganism-in-american-culture/
Animals and Religion
www.allaboutanimals.org.uk/sk2-religion.asp