Dr. Ricardo Ainslie

Director of Research and Education

Dr. Ainslie is the director of research and education for AMPATH/MAPAS México and director of the Mexico Center at UT’s LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. Since January 2017, Ricardo Ainslie has led one of the foremost centers for the study of Mexico in the United States. The Center promotes and coordinates the advancement of Mexican studies at the University of Texas at Austin through research, scholarly exchange, and interdisciplinary collaborations with researchers at Mexico's leading institutions. Within the Center, Dr. Ainslie has established the Mexico Health Initiative, which will focus on a range of Mexican public health issues, including early childhood development, nutrition, chronic diseases, migration and health, and the health risk factors of poverty. Dr. Ainslie's work focuses on communities in the United States and Mexico that have experienced significant conflict, violence, and transformation, exploring broader questions about how communities absorb crises and how individuals and cultural groups live within them. A hallmark of his projects is that he uses a variety of media, including documentary film, photographic exhibits, and books, to foster reflection within the communities he studies and beyond them. Dr. Ainslie's work is highly interdisciplinary in character as reflected in his affiliations with the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, the Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, and the American Studies programs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also the M.K. Hague Centennial Professor in Education in the department of Educational Psychology. In this work he has gravitated toward the methodological approaches more typically associated with anthropology, American studies, liberal arts, and creative non-fiction, developing a hybrid methodology that he terms ‘psychoanalytic ethnography’ because he conducts in-depth interviews that typically have a deeply psychological character. He is a native of Mexico City, Mexico, and a US citizen. He earned his bachelor’s degree (psychology) at the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Michigan. He is also board certified in psychology and psychoanalysis.