Gardiana Bandeira Melo

Dr Gardiana Bandeira Melo is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. She leads research on Africa in the International Student Mobility and World Development project exploring the impact of exchange programmes and policy development in education in addressing social and economic inequalities.

She has been awarded a PhD in Critical Development Studies from Cardiff Metropolitan University and holds MSc and BSc degrees in Economics from Sorbonne University.  Her doctoral research examined the mechanisms through which capitalism and neoliberal policies are legitimised via infrastructure development and their resulting implications.

Her current work is centred on African Indigenous Knowledge Systems (AiKS), decolonial education and climate justice. It investigates how traditional knowledge informs equitable and sustainable development strategies, contributing to decolonial approaches in global education and challenging dominant paradigms in socio-economic and environmental governance.