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Housed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Immigration Initiative is led by an interdisciplinary group of scholars, practitioners, and students. An Executive Committee of Harvard faculty provides input on programming and activities complemented by an active set of student fellows. Our National Advisory Board consists of immigration experts in research, policy, and practice from across the country who provide regular feedback on activities and dissemination efforts. 

Carola Suárez-Orozco will assume the directorship of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard beginning July 1, 2022. 
Read the announcement.

Carola Suárez-Orozco

Director

Professor in Residence, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Carola Suárez-Orozco is a Professor in Residence at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Director of the Immigration Initiative at Harvard. She is also the co-founder of Re-Imagining Migration. Carola Suarez-Orozco

Using mixed-methodological strategies, her work focuses on elucidating the child, adolescent, and young adult experience of immigration—how is their development shaped by immigration and how are they changed by the process?  She has studied a wide variety of processes including identity formation, family separations, civic engagement, and the unauthorized experience. A focus on school settings has been an essential and enduring theme in her basic research agenda as schools are a first contact point between the immigrant children, their families, and the new society.  

Her books include: Children of Immigration, Learning a New Land, Transitions: The Development of the Children of Immigrants, Education: Our Global Compact in a Time of Crisis, as well as Immigrant-Origin Students in Community College: Navigating Risk and Reward in Higher Education among others. 

She has been awarded an American Psychological Association (APA) Presidential Citation for her contributions to the understanding of cultural psychology of immigration, has served as Chair of the APA Presidential Task Force on Immigration, and is a member of the National Academy of Education. 

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.

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