Joana Mesquita is a doctoral student in educational sciences at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences of the University of Porto (FPCEUP) and a member of CIIE – the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education. She holds a research grant from FCT (2021.08976.BD) and she is currently developing a research project entitled “Dancing to the sound of Well-being and Youth Citizenships: Challenges and Opportunities of Art in Education”. Her research interests are related to education with the arts, youth well-being, relational health in education contexts, gender identities and diversity, social exclusion and inequality phenomena, school failure, sports, young citizenship, and participatory research methodologies. Throughout her career, she has developed and participated in research on a larger and smaller scale, and has belonged to several organizing committees of scientific events. Currently, she belongs to the coordination team of the research group PIV – Policies of Inclusion and Voices: Diversity, Gender and Intersectionality from CIIE.

Eunice Macedo is an Assistant Professor at FPCEUP and a full member of CIIE. She has a Ph.D (master's and bachelor degrees) in Educational Sciences from FPCEUP. As a researcher of CIIE, she integrated the team of the EU-funded research project "Reducing Early School Leaving in Europe" (RESL.eu), in which she developed her Post-Doc, as well as the teams of other international projects "Commitment to Democracy through Increasing Women's Participation" (CODE_IWP) and "Learning in a New Key: Engaging vulnerable young people in school education” (LINK) that nationally she coordinated. For more than ten years, she has been a guest speaker at FPCEUP in various cycles, and she is currently the vice-president of the board of the Paulo Freire Institute of Portugal. Author of several works, her research on education, citizenship, and gender, particularly with young people in schools, supports her intervention with communities, in search of ways of education and life linked to happiness and personal fulfillment, and mediated by the world.

Helena C. Araújo is an Invited Full Professor at FPCEUP and a member of CIIE. She currently co-chairs the research group PIV – Policies of Inclusion and Voices: As Full Professor at UPorto she taught sociology of education, gender studies and citizenship, and diversity. She directed the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education (CIIE), hosted by FPCEUP, between 2010 and 2020, leading the team that achieved 'Excellent' for CIIE at the Portuguese R&D Units research evaluation process (2018-2019). Her main research interests are: education as a social right, school disengagement, young people's biographies and pathways, gender, education, citizenship, and intercultural education. She was the lead editor of the refereed journal Educação, Sociedade & Culturas/Education, Society & Cultures (2010-2020). Recent publications include articles in Studies in Higher Education, Educational Review, and European Educational Research Journal.