Amanda Pinheiro de Oliveira grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she graduated in journalism and worked as a reporter for different publications. In 2010, she migrated from the newsroom to academia, and to the United States. She completed a M.A. in Latin America and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2014, concluding her research “Migration Without Borders? The Case of the Mercosur Agreement and Bolivian Immigrants in Brazil". For this study, Amanda examined the tensions between Mercosur migration policies and the life experiences of Bolivian workers employed in Sao Paulo's garment industry. In 2015, she joined the PhD program in Global Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, where she has investigated the dynamics behind the transformation of emerging countries into humanitarian superpowers, with specific focus on the consequences of this process for migrants in the Global South.