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Navigating ‘citizenship gaps’: Youth participatory action research in Kakuma Refugee Camp

Navigating ‘citizenship gaps’: Youth participatory action research in Kakuma Refugee Camp

Wednesday, December 7, 2022
12:00pm
CERAS 204

Michelle Bellino, Associate Professor, University of Michigan

Michelle Bellino is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Education. Her research centers on the intersections between education and youth civic development, with particular attention to contexts impacted by armed conflict and forced displacement. Across diverse settings, she explores how experiences with violence, asylum, and peace and justice processes influence young people’s participation in schools and society, future aspirations, as well as educational access and inclusion. In her work, she traces youth experiences from schools to their homes and communities in order to understand how knowledge and attitudes toward historical (in)justice travel across public and private spaces, as well as between generations. She draws on ethnographic methods and youth participatory action research to ask how young people construct understandings of justice and injustice, while shaping an evolving sense of themselves as local and global civic actors. Infusing these themes into her teaching, she encourages students to consider how education systems in pluralistic societies reconcile with legacies of violence and division, and how to create authentic openings for critical inquiry, perspective-taking, and dialogue across difference. She is the author of Youth in Postwar Guatemala: Education and Civic Identity in Transition (Rutgers University Press) and co-editor (with J.H.Williams) of (Re)constructing memory: Education, identity, and conflict (Sense). Her work has been featured in Harvard Educational Review; Anthropology and Education Quarterly; and Comparative Education Review. She has been recognized as a Peace Scholar by the United States Institute of Peace and a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Spencer Foundation. Her book, Youth in Postwar Guatemala won the Council of Anthropology and Education’s Outstanding Book Award in 2018.

This talk will begin with an overview of my driving research questions and a brief introduction into past studies, set in contexts impacted by armed conflict and displacement. Drawing on ethnographic and participatory research set Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp, the remainder of the talk will explore the ways that refugee youth understand their right to education and the civic means available to them for claiming these rights. Everyday school-based interactions carry mixed messages about the level of rights and autonomy that refugee students have over shaping the content and contexts for their learning. Frequently, refugee students’ concerns are dismissed, repositioning youth as beneficiaries with limited agency. Simultaneously, refugee youth are instructed to cultivate self-reliance as an antidote to dependency. In the context of a youth participatory action research (YPAR) collaboration, a cohort of refugee youth mobilized strategies for claiming social and economic rights such as access to school and dignified work. Our collaboration resulted in the creation of a social media page that shares information about educational and work opportunities in the camp, while orienting youth to the reality that these opportunities are scarce and limited. This presentation focuses on the final stage of our YPAR collaboration, examining collaborative decision-making processes in the transition from research to collective action. In doing so, this study illuminates the real and perceived constraints on youths’ rights and the transformative possibilities within the camp context. It also points to the limits of transformative methodologies that embolden young people to critique structures that govern their lives, especially so for stateless peoples whose survival depends on continued access to those same structures.

Event Details


Event Admission 
GSE community only
Event Audience 
Faculty/Staff
Admitted Students
PhD Students
MA/MS Students
Undergraduates

Contact Information


Contact Name 
Jesse Rivas
Contact Phone 
(650) 723-2109
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