Here in the Honors Program, we are incredibly proud of our talented team of educators. The professors in our program come from a wide array of academic disciplines and they are incredibly passionate about the subjects they study and teach. This quarter, the Honors Program is happy to welcome three new professors who will be teaching new Honors courses.
One of these professors is Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera (she/they), who will be teaching the HON 302 course, “Colonialisms and Resistance”. Professor Aguilera is currently an assistant professor in DePaul’s Latin American and Latino Studies department. Their specialties include decolonial and anticolonial feminism, environmental racism, antiracist movements in the Americas, and community-engaged activist methodologies. Allison Scott, one of our blog writers, reached out to Professor Aguilera to ask a few questions about her work.
Tell us a little about yourself!
My name is Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera and I was born and raised in Mexico. I did my Ph.D. in Latin American Studies with a minor in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Before coming to DePaul University, I was an Assistant Professor in Latin American and Latinx Studies and Anthropology at Lake Forest College. I specialize in environmental racism in Mexico, specifically in a case on the coast of Oaxaca. I also work on issues of activist scholarship, decolonial and anticolonial thinking and praxis, social movements, and critical feminist epistemologies and methodologies.
In 2021, I received the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)/ University of Illinois (UIP) First Book Prize, which means UIP will publish my dissertation. The tentative title of my book is “Grieving Geographies, Mourning Waters: Race, Gender, and Environmental Struggles on the Coast of Oaxaca, Mexico.”
I worked as a community organizer while I grew up and lived in Mexico, and my community work constantly nourishes my scholarship. When I am not teaching or researching, I collect vinyl records, especially different music genres from Latin America.
Can you tell us about the Honors course you will be teaching in the fall?
I will be teaching in the fall the Seminar in Social Justice. This seminar will center on Black, Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and other critical thinkers from the Global South. Social justice also implies epistemic justice, meaning we have to read authors that historically have been silenced in mainstream Academia. Aside from the authors, we will also be analyzing different anticolonial and decolonial social movements in the world so that we cover both the theory and praxis of different examples of struggles for social justice globally.
In your opinion, how does your course relate to DePaul’s Vincentian mission of social justice?
The core of the course is social justice, which is directly tied to DePaul’s Vincentian mission. By reading authors and social mobilizations from historically underrepresented communities, we are subverting the construction of knowledge but also building bridges among different communities. DePaul University’s Vincentian mission is also related to the course in that we will be inspired by people who seek human dignity and environmental justice but also build community hope necessary in the contemporary world.
If a student leaves your class having learned just one thing, what do you hope that one thing will be?
I want students to learn the importance of reading authors from the Global South and about political mobilization seeking social justice and what it looks like. Ultimately, I want students to leave the classroom feeling hope and imagining new worlds possible.
Leave a Reply