Dr Gabriel holds a BA Honours degree in Journalism Studies from London Metropolitan University and a PhD in Media, Culture and Communication from the University of Salford. During her tenure in higher education, she has combined a traditional academic role in teaching, research, and professional practice with leadership in educational equity.
As a final year undergraduate student she developed the journalism project ‘People With Voices’ to increase participation in the news industry among the most under-represented groups. The project was funded by UnLtd and London Metropolitan University and has been archived by the British Library. Her past journalistic work focused on giving voice to the perspectives and experiences of marginalised groups and articulating issues around inequality. She wrote for several publications including Times Higher Education, Guardian and Independent and was frequently called upon as a media commentator to provide analysis of historic and contemporary issues and events. She has been interviewed across television, radio, print and online in the UK and US for a range of media outlets including BBC, Guardian, Independent, Times Higher Education and Huff Post.
She has served as Founder and Director of Black British Academics since 2013, a global community she developed as a collective platform to advance educational equity in higher education. As a research leader she developed the Ivory Tower Project on race and gender inequality in academia, leading two research teams on the edited volumes: Inside the Ivory Tower and Transforming the Ivory Tower, published by UCL Press and launched in the UK and US at eight higher education institutions. During her academic tenure she specialized in inclusive teaching strategies, applying her expertise to the development of new undergraduate modules. She developed a framework called 3D Pedagogy, to decolonise, democratise and diversify the curriculum, creating a workshop for lecturers, teaching, and programme staff which she delivered at several universities on a consultancy basis.
Her intellectual work is interdisciplinary and often focused on race and gender, education and social justice, and transformative pedagogies. She explores these areas through the lens of intersectionality, examining the relationships between race, gender, power, privilege, and inequality. She also specializes in Black feminist epistemology and critical paradigms, applying mixed methods to qualitative-interpretative research. She has presented her findings at international conferences around the world and is an accomplished public speaker.
In 2023 she was appointed as a Visiting Research Fellow at London Metropolitan University and has recently been elected as a Visiting Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford University, for the 2024-25 academic year. In 2024, Dr Gabriel launched the Jenny Harriott Foundation, a historic legacy named after an enslaved ancestor born in the Parish of Saint Elizabeth, Jamaica in 1811. The Foundation provides financial support to the Zion Hill Primary School in Bombay, Manchester, which has longstanding ties to the Harriott family.