This paper presents insights into an ongoing research project with female migrants who came to Germany from the Middle East as adults, often mothers. Most of them are refugees. This project was planned as a ‘classic’ biographical study with aim to reconstruct experience of different societal groups in terms of education in transnational contexts. Even though the researcher is familiar and sensible for critical race and critical whiteness perspectives and the dilemma of voice in asymmetric interview-settings (in terms of race, language, class and academic status) and hence willing to reflect this, she was surprised by the way the “participants” turned the projects into their own political project. The interviews were conceptualised as narrative interviews (Schütze 2012). These interviews are usually conducted between two people: the interviewer and the interviewee. This setting was the first thing that has been transformed, because many of the interviews were part of a larger group in the setting of a women’s project at a refugee support centre. The second thing was language. Most women wanted to speak German and did it, but they also switched to Arabic. Some interviews were solely in Arabic and were translated after transcription. Hence, the hegemony of German was not only addressed but relativized at least to some extent. Thirdly, the women became involved into the process of publication and hence to re-appropriate their stories. The whole research process became a joint project within the context of a refugee initiative in Flensburg. From a Critical Race (Delgado et al. 2023) and Critical Whiteness (Applebaum 2016) point of view it is important to name and hear racial and with-it intersectional power structures also on the level of research (Chadderton 2012). In this paper will be outlined, in which ways racial lines are tackled and at the same time politization and solidarization is practiced and bound back to biographies. This might open new perspectives on education or Bildung as process of gaining and maintaining agency (Wischmann 2018). Therefore, two of the (so far 8) interviews as (counter)stories (Solorzano and Yosso 2001) will be presented. The interviews are analysed with a reconstructive, narrative-analytical approach (Rosenthal 1993).

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