Zoe Gardner (migration expert)

Zoe Gardner (born April 1988) is an English migration and asylum policy specialist, researcher, advocate, and writer.

Early life and education
Gardner's father is a lawyer. Gardner graduated from King's College London in 2011 with a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and Modern Greek Studies, and from the London School of Economics (LSE) in 2012 with a Master of Science in Comparative Politics with a focus on Nationalism and Ethnicity. She later returned to the LSE to do PhD research on migration into the European Union (EU).

Career
Gardner began her career working in media and communications for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles in Brussels, Asylum Aid, and as a policy and practice assistant for the Race Equality Foundation. She was on the board of Trustee Medical Information for Ethnic Minorities (MIEM) and Tell MAMA, and the steering committee of Movement Against Xenophobia. She volunteered with Platanos Refugee Solidarity in Lesbos, Greece.

Gardner has contributed to publications such as Politics.co.uk, openDemocracy, The New Arab, PRWeek, Red Pepper, The Independent, Novara Media, The Guardian, Metro, The Big Issue, and Byline Times. She has collaborated with the likes of Yanis Varoufakis, Mary Kaldor, Nadia Whittome, and Owen Jones. Gardner has also appeared on programmes such as BBC News and Newsnight, Channel 4 News, Sky News, and Talk TV.

Gardner worked as a policy advisor and advocacy manager on the Joint Council for The Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI) from 2021 to 2022, and as a policy and research manager for the European Network on Statelessness from 2022 to 2023. In 2021, she was a witness at the second sitting of the Nationality and Borders Bill committee in Parliament. A clip of an exchange between Gardner and Conservative MP Jonathan Gullis, in which she debunked and clarified claims commonly made about asylum seekers, went viral in February 2023. Gardner also contributed to the 2022–2023 Women and Equalities Committee's "Equality and the UK asylum process" report.