HOME /

People

The Immigration Initiative is located at Harvard University and led by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, practitioners, and students. In addition to IIH staff, an Executive Committee of Harvard faculty provides input on programming and activities. A National Advisory Board, consisting of immigration experts in policy and practice, provides regular feedback on activities and dissemination efforts. 

A larger group of Harvard and Boston-area faculty interested in the Initiative’s mission, goals and activities serve as Faculty Affiliates, and a small group of Harvard students make up a Student Advisory Board.

 

Gabrielle Oliveira Gabrielle-Oliveira

Faculty Lead

Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Gabrielle Oliveira’s research focuses on immigration and mobility — on how people move, adapt, and parent across borders. Her expertise includes gender, anthropology, transnationalism across the Americas. Merging the fields of anthropology and education through ethnographic work in multiple countries, Oliveira also studies the educational trajectories of immigrant children. She is the author of Motherhood Across Borders: Immigrants and their Children in Mexico and in New York City (NYU Press). The book has won the inaugural Erickson and Hornberger Book Award by the University of Pennsylvania's Ethnography Forum and the award for book of the year by the Council of Anthropology and Education.

Learn More About Gabrielle

Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Oliveira received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City. She was the recipient of the National Academy of Education/ Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, and she has been also awarded a postdoc fellowship from the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation to study the consequences of the 2018 zero-tolerance policy on family separation under the Trump Administration. Oliveira is also part of a group called "Colectiva Infancias" that has won a grant from the National Geographic Foundation to assemble a public-facing website on the stories of immigrant children who migrate within the Americas.

Oliveira has been engaged in studying Brazilian migration to Massachusetts and has extensively focused on how immigrant children and families navigate newfound educational systems amid a global pandemic. She has worked closely with teachers in dual language programs whose students are Brazilian working to understand what the constraints are in educational practices in and out of classrooms. Her publications can be found in journals like Anthropology and Education Quarterly; Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education; Bilingual Research Journal; TESOL Quarterly; Global Studies of Childhood; among others.

Our Affiliates