About
Ariel Peterson (she/her/hers) is a Ph.D student in the English Language and Literature program at the University of Michigan. Motivated by lawyers and legal scholars like Bryan Stevenson and Michelle Alexander, Ariel spent her high school years and much of her time as an undergraduate believing she was destined for a law career. However, her coursework and extracurricular research at UCLA brought to light the cruel rigidity and even mercilessness the law often espouses, especially towards condemned people, leaving her disillusioned with the field. Now, in pursuing a Ph.D, she hopes to study notions of justice in more expansive, creative, and curious ways than the legal field typically provides. Literature both undergirds and helps us decode and navigate the world we have constructed for ourselves, so Ariel seeks to investigate the ways in which narrative patterns have encouraged us to conceptualize justice as retributive—to link our insisting stories cannot end without redress for harms caused with our embrace of incarceration as an adequate system of punishment. Somewhat conversely, she is also interested in cultural appreciation of redemption stories and the dissonance between narrative satisfaction via redemption and real-world hostility to perceived and actual wrongdoers. She anticipates that her work will necessitate consideration of theories of punishment throughout history and across both colonizer and colonized cultures, as well as looking forward towards the future, informed by abolitionist and activist storytelling.
Ultimately, Ariel wants to participate in conversations imagining a world where establishing responsibility for harms caused does not require the perpetuation of further violence, and these would be utterly incomplete without elevating and considering seriously the voices of those who are or have been incarcerated. She is excited to join the University of Michigan’s scholarly community whose unique support for prison education and artistic endeavors resonate with her firm belief that it is never too late to change your mind, your path, or your worldview, or to become who you are.
