Her research results from long-term ethnographic fieldwork mainly in Latin America (Chile, Brazil, Bolivia), and it centres on indigenous urbanism and alternative urban epistemologies. While focusing on urban indigeneity, Olivia is more broadly interested in the multiple ways in which displaced trajectories are drawn and inhabited, and her analysis sheds light on how marginalised identities and belongings are negotiated, transformed and articulated. Built at the crossroad of social and visual anthropology, urban studies, and the arts, it is concerned with inequalities and marginalisation, but also endurance and creative re-imaginations within contemporary Latin American cities.
Olivia's approach is strongly collaborative, aimed at critically re-thinking knowledge production and research practice. This is achieved through an established partnership with indigenous artists, activists, and scholars, a collaboration reflected in her co-authored publications and especially in the book Performing the Jumbled City. Subversive Aesthetic and Anticolonial Indigeneity (Manchester University Press, 2022).
From 2017 to 2020, she was Marie Curie Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences of the University of Manchester and at the Instituto de Estudios Urbanos at the Pontificia Universidad Católica (Chile). Currently, she is Research Associate at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield (UK), and she holds a Wenner Gren Hunt Writing Fellowship (US).