By Marlies Bockstal
2025 IAVS blog editor
PhD Student at New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, Aotearoa New Zealand
marlies.bockstal@pg.canterbury.ac.nz
It’s the end of 2025 and this marks the close of the 6th year of the International Association for Vegan Sociologists. It’s wonderful to see this international vegan sociology community growing every year. We now even have over 600 signups, too many to keep our monthly newsletter going for free. But we consider that a good problem! We’ll have to find more creative ways than the newsletter, or find a way to keep it going, to keep you all in the loop about everything that’s happening within our community and interesting opportunities. But rest assured, we will also keep you updated via social media and our website of course. You can reach out to us if you want us to promote any new research or announcements at any time!
Our 6th annual IAVS free online conference the first weekend of October was also a success. We saw a lot of our regular attendees and some new faces as well, including some vegan activists from Romania. It’s so great to see that we can connect vegan activists with vegan sociology academics, creating meaningful connections between the worlds of academia and activism. We even had Kate Steward and me (Marlies) baking some vegan goodies together on Sunday. We started joking that we should hold a baking presentation session next year. Maybe we will. Too bad we can’t hold a taste panel online. Hopefully we can hold it in person, some day. In addition, we were able to listen to a moving poetry interlude by Maria Martelli. It truly was a conference about senses and emotions.
This year, the Australasian vegan sociologists started weekly Shut up & Write (SUAW) sessions to connect with each other on a regular basis as it can be lonely sometimes to be a vegan sociologist. Even though the goal is to shup up and get some writing done, sometimes there tends to be more talking than writing done. But sometimes that’s what you need. The hour difference makes it challenging for the European time zones to join in so we’re looking to possibly add another SUAW at a different time.
We’ve also had some interesting blog posts this year based on our members research, going from the promotion of veganism on social media and how the Animal Agriculture Industry counters campaigns promoting dietary change to questions about greyhounds as ‘pets’ and decolonial and intersectional veganism. We’re accepting new ones at any time so if you want to turn your own research, ideas, conference presentation into a blog post, you can reach out to us to get this posted on our blog!
Next year, we’re hoping to start up some other initiatives such as a “Research Lab” for (Postdoc) researchers, vegan sociology meetups in person, more SUAW sessions, and maybe even rebooting our podcast. We’re looking for people to take the lead on such initiatives. So, don’t hesitate to reach out if you want to be involved!
Lastly, a special shout out to Alex, Libby and Stephen of our IAVS committee for the commitment the past year. Thank you for all your meaningful work! And as always, thank you to Corey and Zoei for being such amazing and inspiring leaders of IAVS and for keeping this vibrant IAVS community going!
It’s been a pleasure being your blog editor for this year.
Thank you all for being involved in your own unique ways.
We hope we’ll see you at the next conference on October 3 & 4 on Internationalising Vegan Sociology! You can already submit your abstract, if you want to be a very early bird 😉
Warm wishes,
Marlies 🌞