Meet student leader Paula Peter

Nipissing students consistently impress as leaders, in the classroom, on campus and in the community. Recently the university celebrated 25 student leaders at the annual Dave Marshall Leadership Awards. Over the coming months, NU News will introduce each student leader to the wider community with a short article discussing their accomplishments and activities. Today, we are pleased to profile Paula Peter, who is working toward a Bachelor of Arts degree, with Honours Specialization in Gender Equality and Social Justice.

Peter is personally committed to transformative social justice activism through research. Academically, she has quietly distinguished herself as a student whose commitment to excellence in her studies is equally matched to her commitment to connecting her intellectual work to real-world issues. Peter excels at wrestling with difficult theory, and with felicity, deploys a diversity of approaches to her research.

Her Honours thesis, titled Humans vs. Animals: A Critical Analysis of White Veganism, is a critical consideration of the inherently racialized nature of ‘mainstream’ veganism through an analysis of a popular online vegan website. Put simply, Peter’s work is revealing the mainstream vegan movement risks structurally excluding a range of people from different class and race backgrounds, and thus, has the potential to reproduce the very systems of power that place animals beneath people in a hierarchy of value in the first place. This research is timely, original, and poised to create positive change.

Peter plans to further her research on the intersection of critical animal studies and social justice studies with Brock University in the Social Justice and Equity Studies Masters Program. There is no doubt she will excel and substantially contribute to this new and emerging area of her field.

The university community is proud to recognize Paula Peter with a Dave Marshall Leadership Award in the Academic Category.