Dr. Brianna Harvey is an Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. A first-generation college student raised in Southern California, her commitment to advancing the wellbeing of youth, families, and communities is rooted in her previous work as a community based social worker in Los Angeles and leadership as the former Director of the UCLA Bruin Guardian Scholars Program. In these roles she worked closely with youth and families as they navigated social institutions including child welfare, education and the criminal legal system, witnessing firsthand how structural and systemic disenfranchisement is produced and maintained at the individual, familial, and community level.

As a critical qualitative methodologist, Dr. Harvey examines how complex systemic inequities emerge when child welfare, schools and carceral systems collusively partner to shape the lives of Black youth and their families, with particular attention to how these structures disrupt wellbeing and delimit Black life. Her work traces the enduring legacy of American chattel slavery to contemporary social institutions, revealing how racialized logics of control and punishment continue to manifest through modern policies, practices, and ideologies. Concurrently, her scholarship elucidates the ways youth and families actively resist, subvert, and reimagine life outside of the subjugation they face within these institutions. Dr. Harvey’s scholarship has been taken up across social welfare, sociology, education, and legal studies. She has published in leading journals including The Education Forum, American Educational Research Journal, Teachers College Record, Journal of School Violence, Innovative Higher Education, and the Columbia Journal of Race and Law.

Dr. Harvey’s community rooted research has been supported by both external and internal funding. Her initial study, Defying Carceral Entrapment: Black Foster Youth Narratives of Subversion, Survival and Liberation, was supported by the Ford Foundation and UCLA’s Fellowship for the Study of Black Life and examined the educational trajectories of Black foster youth collegians in Southern California. Building on this work, she served as principal investigator on a study funded by UC Berkeley’s Transition-Age Youth Research and Evaluation Hub (TAY-Hub), Challenging Anti-Blackness in Education: Amplifying the Voices of Black Foster Youth Students through Counter-Storytelling, which engaged Black foster youth collegians across the state of California. She is currently working on a second TAY-Hub funded project as principal investigator, A Socio-Ecological Examination of the Educational and Life Trajectories of Young Men of Color with Foster Care Experience.

Across these studies, Dr. Harvey’s research shows how institutional disenfranchisement and structural collusion constrain the life chances of youth and their families, while simultaneously highlighting how they enact fugitivity, subversion, and everyday practices of resistance to challenge these conditions. Together, these findings offer critical insights for social workers and social institutions, prompting deeper examination of how policies and practices shape individual, familial, and community wellbeing, and advance community informed guidance and practice recommendations grounded in lived experience.
Dr. Harvey received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California.

Selected Publications:

Harvey, B., & Howard, T. (2025). The genius is not hidden — they just weren’t looking: Refusing erasure in the lives of Black foster youth. The Educational Forum, 89(4), 496-513. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131725.2025.2539043

Harvey, B., & Wali, J. (2025) It’s Never Been about the Welfare of Children: The Origins of the Term Family Police. How to End the Family Policing System: From Outrage to Action. Haymarket Books

Whitman, K. L., Ruderman, M. A., Harvey, B., Tully, B., Berman, A., & Langley, A. K. (2025). A mixed-methods study of students of color with foster care experience navigating a syndemic. Innovative Higher Education, advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-025-09829-6

Harvey, B., Cabral, B., Annamma, S. A., & Morgan, J. (2024). “Ain’t nobody about to trap me”: The violence of multi-system collusion and entrapment for incarcerated disabled girls of color. Journal of School Violence, 23(2), 202–219. https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220.2023.2297035

Annamma, S. A., Cabral, B., Harvey, B., Wilmot, J. M., Le, A., & Morgan, J. (2024). “When we come to your class… we feel not like we’re in prison”: Resisting prison-school’s dehumanizing and (de)socializing mechanisms through abolitionist praxis. American Educational Research Journal, 61(1), 3-47. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312231198236

Cabral, B., Annamma, S. A., Le, A., Harvey, B., Wilmot, J. M., & Morgan, J. (2022). Solidarity incarcerated: Building authentic relationships with girls of color in youth prisons. Teachers College Record, 124(7), 174-200. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681221111458

For a full list of Dr. Harvey’s publications please check out Google Scholar