About Ariana
My personal mission centers health equity by naming structural systems causing inequities. I am on the tech job market, aspiring for a career as an ethnographer in industry.
Research Interests
Care, food, farmworker health, Florida
Research Background
I began fieldwork in Sulawesi, Indonesia, researching the consequences of Protestant missionization and conversion of upland swidden rice farmers whose descendants live in what is currently the world’s most populous Muslim nation. These highlanders taught me how land and local knowledge was not owned outright by individual humans. Rather, they were subject to distributed authority, differential patterns of use, and ritual relations with non-humans. Beginning in 1998, I investigated and analyzed Indonesia’s regional tensions and religious conflicts, which are based in long-standing inequities as well as more recent economic and political policies.
Education
PhD, University of North Carolina, Pending; MPH, Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, 2015; BS, University of South Florida, 2011
Publications
Ávila, A. Essential or Expendable during the COVID-19 Pandemic? A lived experience on grieving the unjust and early deaths of vulnerable populations. American Journal of Public Health. DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2020.306001
Presentations
Chao, Sophie, Jessica Hardin, Megan Carney, Hanna Garth, Ariana Ávila, Lupita Vasquez, Sarah Elton, Terese Gagnon, and Pallavi Laximikanth. “Metabolic (in)justice: nutrition & nourishment in the teeth of racial colonial capitalism.” American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2023. In-Person. October 16, 2023.