Our team’s paper, “Youth, Migration, and Active Citizenship: Exploring Students’ Citizenship Vocabularies Across Six Countries” is now out in the American Educational Research Journal. The paper was prepared by Miri Yemini, Garth Stahl, Tatiana Khavenson, Vanessa R. Sperduti, Martyna Elerian, Carla Inguaggiato, Tara Bartlett, Simon Eten Angyagre, and Ullrich Bauer.

The study is part of the international STUDACT project, spanning six countries — Australia, Germany, Italy, Poland, the UK, and the USA. They spoke with more than seven hundred secondary school students about civic activism in their own words. Migration wasn’t their starting point — it emerged organically from students’ lived experiences, shaped by digital platforms, school, and everyday life. One of the paper’s key findings: migrants are routinely cast in a passive role, either as recipients of help rather than active participants, or as a “problem” to be solved rather than a human reality to be embraced. Either way, the voices and agency of migrants themselves get left out of the conversation — a silence that is often internalized and accepted as the norm.

This narrative does more than lay the groundwork for marginalization. It actively undermines the educational potential of the entire student body. Rather than serving as an opportunity for mutual learning and civic growth, the multicultural experiences of migrant students are overlooked — turning what should be an asset into an ignored obstacle.