The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio & Research Interests

I am a doctoral student in the Ethnic Studies graduate program and a full-spectrum traditional birth worker. My dissertation project is solution-oriented and focuses on place-based health/care and embodied methodologies for community health research and practice through radical social movement history.

I am a recipient of the Ford Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellowship and the UC Berkeley School of Public Health Fellowship and am an alum of the Graduate Student Fellows Program at the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues and Berkeley Center for Social Medicine (2018-2020). I hold a Master of Public Health degree (2016) and a Master of Arts degree in Ethnic Studies (2013). I am currently a collective member and co-director at Movement Generation-Justice and Ecology Project and a core member of the Healing Clinic Collective.

If you live in the Bay Area or are a student or alum of UC Berkeley, then you benefit from unceded Chochenyo Ohlone Land, home of the Lisjan Ohlone people. Please sign up here to contribute to the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust and make your Land Tax Donation.

Advisor:

Laura E. Pérez

Ula Taylor (African American Studies)

Charles Briggs (Anthropology)

Courses Taught or Assisted

Lead Instructor

Spring 2021. “Knowing Place and Self Through Birthing and Healing: Red Medicine, Ecological Justice, and the Beginning of New Worlds,” Chicanx Studies R1B: Reading and Composition

Fall 2020. “Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Ecological Justice: Knowing Place and the Beginning of New Worlds,” Native American Studies R1A: Reading and Composition

Spring 2020. “Third World Studies and Inter-relational Chicano Studies at 50: Community-Engaged Reading, Research and Composition,” Chicana Studies R1B: Reading and Composition

Spring 2018. “Critical Thinking, Researching, Reading, and Writing through Inter-relational Liberation Movements,” Chicano Studies R1B: Reading and Composition

Summer 2016. “Research Writing Through Turtle Island Feminisms,” Native American Studies R1B: Reading and Composition.

Summer 2014. “Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing: Race in the Americas,” Native American Studies R1A: Reading and Composition.

Summer 2013. “Indigenous Knowledges and Philosophies in Practice,” Native American Studies R1B: Research Writing.

Fall 2012 / Spring 2013 “Historytelling in the Americas,” Native American Studies R1A: Reading and Composition.

Graduate Student Instructor 

Fall 2019. Chicano Studies 50: Chicano/a History

Fall 2018. Ethnic Studies 101A: Social Science Methods in Ethnic Studies

Fall 2017. Ethnic Studies 101A: Social Science Methods in Ethnic Studies

Spring 2014. Asian American Studies R2A: Reading and Composition.

Spring 2012. Asian American Studies R2A: Reading and Composition.

Fall 2011. Chicano Studies 50: Introduction to Chicano History.

Graduate Student Reader

Spring 2016. Chicano Studies 20: Chicano Culture

Select Publications

Aguilar, A. (2020). “Parenting During Coronavirus: Opportunities to Reconnect and Decolonize,” YES! Magazine.

Aguilar, A. (2020).  “Are we ready for bioregional governance?,” Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project, Medium Publication. 

Aguilar, A. (2019) The Myth of a Work-Life Balance. The Daily Californian. 

Aguilar, A. R. (2019). Envisioning “Loving Care” in Impermanent Healing Spaces: Sacred and Political Organizing Towards Decolonial Health/Care in Oakland, California. UC Berkeley: Institute for the Study of Societal Issues. (Awarded Graduate Student Paper Prize, Society for Medical Anthropology, Complimentary and Alternative Medicine, and Integrative Medicine Special Interest Group.)

Aguilar, A. (2017) “Book Review: Brett Hendrickson’s Border Medicine: A Transcultural History of Mexican American Curanderismo,”  Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 42 (1), pp. 315-320.

Aguilar, A. (2013). Teaching A Son The Moon: Five Lessons. nineteen sixty nine: an ethnic studies journal, 2(1).