Gabrielle Oliveira is assistant professor of foundations of education at the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. Her research focuses on immigration and mobility—on how people move, adapt, and parent across borders. Her expertise includes gender, anthropology, transnationalism in Latin America. Merging the fields of anthropology and education through ethnographic work in multiple countries, Oliveira also studies the educational trajectories of immigrant and first and second generation children.
Oliveira received her bachelor’s degree in her native Brazil and earned her master’s and doctoral degrees from Teachers College and Columbia University, where she was also a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Dissertation. Oliveira has recently published Motherhood Across Borders: Immigrants and Their Children in Mexico and New York (2018) by NYU Press that won the Inaugural Outstanding Book Award in Ethnography at the Penn Ethnography Forum. Oliveira was also a 2018 Concha Delgado Gaitan Presidential Fellow awarded by the Council of Anthropology and Education.
She is also the co-founder of the group Colectiva Infancias, a Latin America group of women scholars who study migration of children across the Americas. The group was recently awarded a grant by The National Geographic Foundation to assemble an online mosaic of migrant children’s experiences. Oliveira lives in Massachusetts with her husband and two children.