The story behind the project.

The background

The Idea

In the summer of 2020, Siaka and Sabine considered starting a joint research project. They also discussed this with Omar Janneh, who, like Siaka, had shaped TWAB's activist work from the beginning. As a result, Sabine and Katharina applied for another DFG project, which would also partly fund this envisioned collaborative project of activists and anthropologists. The application was successful and with Gift Terhemen and Fatoumata Cham, two more activist researchers agreed to join the team. Finally, the new research team started their joint adventure.

The beginning of the research

In August 2021 we came together for our first workshop in Bremen. Here, we laid the ground for our collaborative work. Many different perspectives were in the room: those of citizens and migrants, younger and older people, scholars and activists. We were people with different educational backgrounds, different life experiences and different resident status. What did we have in common? How could we acknowledge our disparate positionalities and define a common purpose? How could we make sure that everybody would have the space to express their thoughts and concerns and that we would be able to translate this into a collective work?

In our discussions, it soon became clear that we all wanted to privilege the stories, experiences, and, above all, the critical analytical voices of refugees. All the refugee activists had experienced being interviewed: by bureaucrats as well as journalists and scholars. Yet they were often not in control of the narrative: within the migration regime, interviews served the purpose of state control and were interrogations rather than conversations. In journalism, their voices were also cut short and not fully represented. Here, we all thought, our project should make a difference. We discussed and identified how our academic and activist methods could relate to and enrich one another and how we could learn from one another.

All of us identified the problematic exclusions of the migration regime and their expression along the lines of age as a starting point for our research project. We agreed on a joint question: “What effects do the categorizations of/as (adult) migrants/refugees have on people's lives and opportunities?” Yet each of us would approach this question from another angle and with different interview partners.

A major concern for all of us was how we could share responsibilities equally, given the severe time constraints on everybody's shoulders: some of us had children to care for, all had to go to school or work long hours. We all agreed that the project was important to us and that we were fully committed to it - while being transparent about our capacities and different strengths.

The research process

Consequently, our process was a constant adjustment. After a long recorded group conversation that focused on our own experiences and our different stakes in the topic, we started taking first field notes and planning first interviews. In this process we decided to stick to interviews as our main research method. In the end, we came up with 16 interviews. Most of our interviewees were refugees who had undergone age estimations or Black mothers whose German children had been denied their birth certificates. However, Omar also talked to a legal counselor and lawyer and Siaka spoke with a teacher and a psychologist, too.

We constantly reflected on the process and exchanged our insights during regular meetings in Bremen or on Zoom. To prepare for the analysis of our large corpus of material, all of us read through it thoroughly, generated keywords, identified main topics and issues and selected outstanding quotes. In January 2022, we met for a longer workshop in Bremen to review our findings, share our ideas, analyze them together and identify a rough structure for our website. From there, we started aligning our material in this structure, which we refined and completed in another longer workshop in April. There we also formulated a first draft of our mission statement together. We continued to work in two groups: one focusing on birth certificates, the other on age determination. We wrote introductions to these topics that mirror the struggles of some of us who were directly affected by these practices and also involved in resisting them. Later, we put everything into wireframes and finally gave this structured material to William VanderVeen who built the website. William studied design at The New School in New York City, where Katharina was a visiting professor in the academic year 2022/23.

As student assistants Nefeli Tatsi, Can Kapcik, and Reeva Dani helped us to transcribe the interviews. Since the beginning of 2022, Felix Schramm from the design studio ag-prop has kindly advised and helped us in the website development process on a voluntary basis. We owe great thanks to him and everyone who supported us in our journey, especially the interviewees.