Czarina Wilpert, Gerhard Kromschröder, and the question of who studies migration, who describes it, and who is heard.

The first episodes of ›Production Site‹ are online, and with them, the podcast of the Collaborative Research Center 1604 ›Production of Migration‹ at Osnabrück University has begun its first season.

The series opens with a portrait of the research center and then moves into its conversations. Among the episodes now available, two were developed and co-hosted by Christoph Rass, each with a different second voice at the table: the first with Catherine S. Ramírez (Santa Cruz), the second with Lale Yildirim (Kiel). Both proceed from the question that drives the entire CRC. How is migration produced? Not as a natural event that simply happens, but as something made: by policies, by institutions, by categories, and not least by scholarship itself.

That these conversations reach an audience at all is the work of Vera Hanewinkel, her colleague Feline Engling Cardoso, and their team, the science communicators at IMIS who built ›Production Site‹ and carried the entire season, from its concept to each released episode. Hanewinkel, responsible for the science communication of both IMIS and SFB 1604, held the series together across hosts, languages, and formats. Her editorial care is audible in every minute of the result. Outstanding work!

This post introduces episodes One and Two in four steps. It first sketches the format and its claim. A second section turns to the conversation with Czarina Wilpert, a third to the one with Gerhard Kromschröder. A final step asks what both encounters make visible about migration research itself.

I. A podcast about the ›production of migration‹

›Production Site‹ is not an explainer format that conveys settled knowledge. The podcast takes the making of migration as its object and, in doing so, carries a premise that runs through all of SFB 1604: that ‘migration’ is not a thing the world contains but a category the world produces. Who counts as a ‘migrant’ and who does not, which terms travel from the academy into schools and administrations, which visibilities and invisibilities result: these are the questions the research center pursues across its subprojects, and the podcast translates them for a wider public.

The reflexive closing dialogue is the format’s signature. Where the interview gives the floor to the guest, the dialogue turns the lens back onto the researchers: What stayed with us? What did we learn about our own blind spots? What remains open? Two registers that science communication usually keeps apart are joined here: engagement with a subject and the methodological self-examination of those who study it. This is what the CRC means by reflexive migration research, and the podcast performs it rather than merely describing it. The series runs across the summer of 2026 and is available on Podigee, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Deezer.

II. The Forerunner: Czarina Wilpert and the beginnings of migration research

The first episode (in English, “The Forerunner”) belongs to a scholar who helped found migration research in Germany and yet long remained at the margins of its recognition: Czarina Wilpert, née Huerta. Behind the German-sounding surname lies a transatlantic life. Raised in a Mexican immigrant family in Los Angeles, Wilpert came to Berlin in the late 1960s and earned her doctorate from the Technical University of Berlin in 1980, with a study of the futures imagined by the ‘second generation’: a subject that would anchor her work for decades. She held positions at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), the TU Berlin, and the Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BIBB); she coordinated a twelve-country European Science Foundation project on cultural identity and migration; and she co-founded civil-society organizations, among them the Initiative Selbstständiger Migrantinnen (1990). A scholar with her own experience of migration, then, who studied immigration while being marked, again and again, as an outsider.

That double position is what the conversation centers on. It asks what Wilpert could see through her own migration biography that her predominantly male colleagues, looking with what she calls a “purely German gaze,” could not. The episode points beyond the individual case to a mechanism: who belongs in a field, and whose knowledge counts, is decided not only by the quality of the work but by boundary-drawing that determines which voice appears legitimate. The reflexive dialogue brings Christoph Rass together with Catherine S. Ramírez, Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, whose book “Assimilation: An Alternative History” (2020) reads assimilation not as something migrants accomplish but as a power relation exercised by the receiving society. The two share a research interest that frames the episode: in the ›Translations of Migration‹ group, they examine how keywords such as ‘guest worker’ and ‘assimilation’ are translated across cultural contexts. Migration, on this reading, is neither a German nor an American subject; it is one whose understanding depends on the very perspectives that were long unheard.

III. Der Grenzgänger: Gerhard Kromschröder and “Als ich ein Türke war”

The second episode (in German, “Der Grenzgänger”) moves from academia into journalism. In the spring of 1982, the reporter Gerhard Kromschröder (b. 1941) dyed his hair, eyebrows, and mustache black, put on the uniform of the Frankfurt sanitation department, and worked undercover for three weeks as a supposedly Turkish street sweeper. His account appeared in October 1982 as a reportage in the weekly journal Stern (issue 42) and in 1983 as the book “Als ich ein Türke war” (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn). He described himself in it as a “Glasmensch,” a man of glass: someone the surrounding world looks straight through without seeing. Almost three years before Günter Wallraff’s “Ganz unten” (1985), Kromschröder had tested a method of covert reportage that ran ahead of its time and, even so, remained in the shadow of the later bestseller.

The historical moment sharpens the report’s force. In 1982, Helmut Kohl replaced Helmut Schmidt as chancellor; several million people without German passports were living in the Federal Republic, a substantial share of them from Turkey. Official rhetoric oscillated between the label of those classified as ‘guest workers’, which suggested an eventual departure, and the slogan of ‘overforeignization’ (Überfremdung). Everyday racism was visible and politically denied. I first encountered Kromschröder not through migration history but in the Emsland, where the journalist had his earliest postings and became one of the early voices documenting the history of the so-called ‘Emsland camps’. That the same man later produced one of the earliest role reportages on racialized labor belongs to the corpus work of subproject A3, “Ihr seid Gastarbeiterkinder!”, which Christoph Rass and Lale Yildirim lead together within SFB 1604. A3 traces how, at the interface of scholarship and school, categories for naming young people read as migrants took shape from the 1960s onward, from ‘guest-worker children’ through ‘foreigner children’ to ‘migrant children’, and with what effect academic language encodes the reality of a migration society.

IV. Forgotten voices and the reflexive turn

More than the timing of their release connects the two episodes. Both concern voices that saw and named, early, what others took up only much later, and that were pushed aside for precisely that reason. A scholar with a Mexican American biography researching Turkish migration in Berlin, and a journalist stepping into a racialized world of work: each looked from the outside at a society that long refused to understand itself as a country of immigration. That their contributions survive only partially in the field’s memory is not an accident. It is part of the very production of visibility and invisibility that the CRC sets out to study.

This is where the reflexive closing dialogue earns its place. It does not rest with honoring forgotten voices; it asks after the conditions under which knowledge about migration is made, and under which it is overlooked. What the two episodes enact, then, is less an answer than a stance: the willingness to treat one’s own gaze as part of the object. Migration is not something research simply finds. It is also a product of the gaze through which we choose to see it.

---

Listen and read on

→ ›Production Site‹ – all episodes: https://www.uni-osnabrueck.de/sfb1604/en/production-insights/podcast → Episode 1, “The Forerunner” (Czarina Wilpert): https://www.uni-osnabrueck.de/sfb1604/en/production-insights/podcast/s01-e01 → Episode 2, “Der Grenzgänger” (Gerhard Kromschröder): https://www.uni-osnabrueck.de/sfb1604/production-insights/podcast/s01-e02

Available on Podigee, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and Deezer.

---

---