Mirco Stella is an international PhD candidate in Education at York University. He holds a BA in Politics and African Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (UK), an MA in Cooperation and Development Studies from La Sapienza University in Rome (Italy) and has experiences in both international and local NGO work as well as grassroots activism and mobilization. He speaks multiple languages - including Italian, English, French, Portuguese, as well as some Kiswahili and Spanish- and is drawn to spaces that promote interculturalism and gesture towards pluriversality.
As part of the Borderless Higher Education for Refugees (BHER) project he has worked as a research assistant and has taught at both undergraduate and graduate level. His current doctoral research focuses on his experiences as an educator in the BHER MEd program and explores the political and ethical potential for decolonizing epistemological, ontological, and historical concepts/antinomies of the Self and Other, through the everyday practices of collaboration in education. His choice to work within the field of education is fueled by an aporia. On the one hand a willingness to investigate the many ways that educational institutions continue to be implicated, epistemologically and ontologically, in the production of current global challenges. On the other hand, the desire to capture and explore the politics of hope, of the possible, that “risks” arising in/from any educational encounter.