Michelle J. Bellino

Across settings in Latin America and East Africa, she studies how young people experience schooling amid violence, migration, asylum, and peacebuilding, and how these experiences shape their understandings of citizenship, rights, agency, and belonging. She is interested in schools as civic institutions: spaces where young people encounter messages about whose histories matter, who belongs, what rights they can claim, and what futures they are encouraged—or permitted—to imagine. Drawing on ethnographic, participatory, and comparative methods, her work has examined peace education and historical justice in Colombia; refugee education, youth aspirations, and participatory action research in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya; and the educational and migratory trajectories of Central American and Venezuelan youth across contexts of origin, transit, destination, and return. Across these projects, she asks how education can reproduce exclusion and inequality, but also how it might support historical justice, peacebuilding, democratic participation, and more inclusive forms of belonging. Her scholarship is situated within comparative and international education and anthropology and education, and engages interdisciplinary work on transitional justice, peace and conflict studies, refugee and migration studies, human rights, and youth civic development.