Gabrielle Oliveira

Gabrielle Oliveira is the Jorge Paulo Lemann Associate Professor of Education and of Brazil Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her first book, Motherhood across Borders: Immigrants and their Children in Mexico and New York (NYU Press, 2018), received numerous book prizes, including an award from the Council of Anthropology and Education and the Erickson- Hornberger Outstanding Ethnography in Education Book Award. She will soon publish her second book, Now We Are Here: Hope, Loss, and the Education of Migrant Children (Stanford University Press, 2025).

While at Radcliffe, Oliveira is preparing a book manuscript based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the north of Brazil where large migratory flows from Venezuela have taken place. Her focus is on how Venezuelan migrant, Brazilian, and Indigenous children co-construct knowledge about climate change, land, and safety inside classrooms and how children’s knowledges are taken up by educators. Her goals are to theorize on children’s participation and voice in climate change education and to push for conceptual frameworks that inform teacher training, curricular choices, and pedagogies inside schools and classrooms in Brazil.

Oliveira has written for the New York Times and has been an expert commentator for Mother Jones, New York Public Radio, TV Globo, and Univision. Her work has been supported by several grants and fellowships, including the American Educational Research Association, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the National Academy of Education, and the Spencer Foundation. Oliveira earned her PhD at Teachers College, Columbia University.