Teresa M. Cappiali is an Affiliated Scholar at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (RWI) in Lund. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Université de Montréal, Canada. She is the Founder and CEO of NOIWE AB (No Innovation Without Education), a Sweden-based educational-innovation company, and the Creator of Transformative-Emancipatory Pedagogy (TEP), a research-based pedagogical architecture that integrates critical pedagogy, transformative and experiential learning, socio-emotional learning, and inclusive education into a coherent and transferable system.
Initially developed to support the teaching of sensitive and controversial subjects in highly diverse classrooms, TEP emerged from and was informed by her long-standing research on migration, racism, human rights, and social inclusion. It has since evolved into a cross-disciplinary framework applicable across educational levels and fields and is increasingly being explored as an integrated approach to fostering deep learning, inclusion, and transformation.
Developed over more than a decade through sustained classroom research, international fieldwork, and educator training across Europe, North Africa, North America, and Asia, TEP is presented in the monograph Transformative-Emancipatory Pedagogy (TEP) to Reimagine Education: Tackling Controversies in Diverse Settings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), the co-edited volume Promoting Inclusion and Justice in Academia: A Transformative-Emancipatory Toolkit for Educators(Edward Elgar, 2024), and an article published in Education Sciences (2023).
The further development, testing, and refinement of TEP continue through TRANSFORM_EDUC, an international research programme dedicated to examining its adaptability and transformative potential across educational contexts and disciplines. The programme originated in her research at Lund University and RWI and is now academically anchored at University College Cork (Ireland), with partners across Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Her collaboration with the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University (UM6P) ecosystem in Morocco is ongoing, including the joint development of a dedicated TEP Lab. As a Resident Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, UM6P (2025–2026), she led its Moroccan phase, including a mixed-methods pilot of TEP at secondary level at the Lycée Mohammed VI d’Excellence. She teaches at the Université Internationale de Rabat (UIR) and at Lund University.
Her earlier research addressed international migration, immigrants’ inclusion, social movements, racism, gender-based violence, and human rights in the Mediterranean region. As a Vinnova MSCA–Seal of Excellence Fellow (2021–2023), she led INTERSEC_RACE, an ethnographic study of migration, racism, and gender-based violence in North Africa. She has also worked extensively as an international consultant and trainer on migration, diversity, inclusion, and human rights with organisations including the American Friends Service Committee, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, and RWI’s international programmes. Her work on migration has appeared in the single-authored monograph Reframing Immigrant Resistance (Routledge, 2022), as well as in journals such as Geopolitics, International Migration Review, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, South European Society and Politics, and the European Journal of Political Research.
She discusses TEP and her vision for human rights education in a 2026 interview on the Human Rights Education Now!podcast (HRE USA).
For further updates, see her profiles on Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and ORCID.
*Affiliated Scholars at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute are encouraged to contribute independent research and analysis. All views and opinions expressed by Affiliated Scholars in publications, interviews, or public appearances are their own and do not represent institutional positions of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute.