Profile

Ricardo Ainslie 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.

His work is highly interdisciplinary in character. This explains his formal affiliations with the Lozano Long Institute for Latin American Studies, the Center for Mexican American Studies, and the American Studies programs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is also a professor and fellow in the Charles H. Spence Centennial Professorship in Education in the department of Educational Psychology. In addition, he is an affiliate faculty member at the Houston Galveston Psychoanalytic Institute. In 2002, he received the Outstanding Contribution to Science Award from the Texas Psychological Association. In 2006 he was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters. And in 2009, he received the Science Award from the American Psychological Association’s Division of Psychoanalysis.  In 2010 Ricardo Ainslie was selected for the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Residency. He is also a Fellow in the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2010-2011).

For almost two decades now Ricardo Ainslie has devoted himself to working in communities in Texas and Mexico that have experienced significant conflict and transformation, exploring broader questions about how communities function and how individuals and cultural groups live within them. A hallmark of his projects is that he has consistently sought ways to use his work to foster reflection, both within those communities and beyond them, about the experiences that are under consideration, using a variety of media, including documentary film, photographic exhibits, and books, to capture and depict the issues he is exploring. In this work he has gravitated toward the methodological sensibilities more typically associated with anthropology, American Studies, Liberal Arts, and creative non-fiction, rather than those of Psychology, developing a hybrid methodology that he terms ‘psychoanalytic ethnography’ because in most cases he conducts in-depth interviews with key individuals and these typically have a deeply psychological character.