“Privilege is not being aware of privileges”
Çağla Diner
“’Privilege’ is not being aware of your privileges.”
The interview tells the story of Çağla Diner, who grew up in Turkey and pursued an academic career. After years of studying and working abroad, she returned, but political developments led to increasing pressure and ultimately to her decision to leave the country.
In Germany, she starts out again under new conditions: with an uncertain residency status, with a fellowship that do not grant any workers’ benefits, and the responsibility to care for her family. Her experiences in everyday life, in her professional environment, and in dealing with public institutions fundamentally reshape her perspective of the “West”, of Germany, identity and privilege.
Today, she reflects on her migration experience and describes it as a process that not only changes one’s everyday life and social relations but also leads her to a new identity formation process, during which she questions the fundamentals of her political socialization during her formative years in Turkey and the United States.
Testimony
Global Academic Career to Political Pressure and Forced Migration
Çağla Diner grows up in Turkey, where she completes her entire school and academic education. After finishing her studies, she moves to the United States, where she lives, conducts research, and works for several years. She then returns to Turkey and continues her academic career. In the context of increasing political repression, censorship, and restrictions on academic autonomy, she feels that she and others like her are unwelcome in Turkey. This ultimately leads to her decision to leave the country.
Precarious Arrival and Family Realities
She comes to Germany through a support program for politically persecuted scholars. Despite her well-paying fellowship, her situation is marked by uncertainty: the absence of formal employment contracts protecting workers’ rights and short-term residence permits makes her living situation precarious. Migrating with a family and children adds further challenges. Limited childcare options for full-time working women and discriminatory practices within the German bureaucracy and labour market play a role in the recurrence of the de-skilling process experienced by many migrants in the country.
For a full transcript of this video interview, please see the PDF linked below in the credits.
Language, Belonging and Diaspora Experience
Language barriers complicate her interpersonal relationships and participation in society. She increasingly relies on diaspora networks rather than engaging with broader social or civic life. The dialectic between her need for support and her desire for recognition and participation leads her to continually reflect on questions of belonging and identity. Life in the diaspora becomes an ongoing process of social and political socialization and negotiation, through which she constructs her new identity.
Historical-Political Background
The interview with Çağla Diner is set against the backdrop of the political developments in Turkey since the 2010s, which, especially after 2016, led to severe restrictions on freedom of expression and academic autonomy. At the heart of this is the persecution of political and intellectual opposition in the country, including the academics who publicly opposed state violence and were subsequently subjected to different forms of repression.
For signing the peace petition “we will not be a party to this crime!’ by the “academics for peace” Çağla Diner was prosecuted in a high criminal court for supporting terrorism. As political repression intensified and censorship became more pervasive, she increasingly felt that she no longer had a place in her country, and eventually she left. Her migration thus took place in the context of political repression rather than a search for better job prospects.
Her arrival in Germany was part of a support program for scholars at risk. These programs provide protection, but are often subject to challenging conditions, such as the absence of employment contracts with regular employee benefits and lack of long-term residency rights. This leaves scholars without legal and economic security, making their future prospects increasingly uncertain.
At the same time, the interview highlights structural challenges in the German context, including bureaucratic hurdles, limited childcare options for full-time working women, language barriers and uncertainties due to limited contracts. Çağla experiences the German university system as entrenched and hierarchical, making it difficult for foreign researchers to continue their career according to their international expertise. In general, many immigrants in Germany are facing patterns of de-skilling shaped by bureaucratic barriers in the recognition of qualifications, language barriers, and risk-averse, exclusionary and often discriminatory structures within the German labour market.
Çağla Diner also points to the role of migrant networks within the Turkish community, which have emerged over the past 10–15 years, driven by out-migration from Turkey due to increasing political repression and rising conservatism in state institutions. These networks1 provide support but, at the same time, can confine new Turkish migrants to their own communities, channelling their social and economic activities inward rather than towards the broader society. Unfortunately, as Çağla Diner puts forward, this dynamic is reinforced by the exclusionary practices and structural inequalities entrenched in broader German society and state structures.
Making of
How and why did you decide to deal with and present this specific story?
On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the recruitment agreement between Bonn and Ankara, the Ruhr Museum presented the exhibition “We Are from Here. Turkish-German Life 1990. Photographs by Ergun Çağatay” (2021), as well as “Mustafa’s Dream. Photographs by Henning Christoph on Turkish Life in Germany 1977–1989” (2021-2022).
Both exhibitions combined historical insights with personal stories and aimed to bring greater attention to the long-overlooked experiences of labour migration in Germany, while also encouraging dialogue between generations and communities.
The accompanying programs were also deliberately designed to be participatory. The decision to tell migration history not only from an institutional perspective, but also to actively involve the communities concerned, was based on the idea of making diverse experiences visible and sharing interpretive authority.
In this context, the Ruhr Museum is involved in the European project FeMig.Lab. Through its own interview project, it specifically focuses on the life stories of migrant women in order to raise the profile of female migration experiences, which have historically been less well documented. The focus is on intergenerational experiences of women from Spain, Greece, and Turkey. Its goal is to connect individual perspectives with broader historical and political contexts, offering a more nuanced view of female labour migration.
How did you negotiate and decide about the methodologies and processes in acquiring/giving the testimony?
The project is designed and carried out by the Ruhr Museum (Meltem Küçükyılmaz) in cooperation with the Spanischen Elternverein Essen e. V. (Cristina Fernández-Moser), HistAgoge | Geschichtsforschung (Spiridon Papaioannou), and the mitMach Agentur (Mustafa Mert). The questionnaire and thematic focus areas were developed jointly, and the selection of interview partners was also evaluated together. This participatory approach builds on the Ruhr Museum’s previous work.
In terms of content, the project focuses on two distinct generations of migration: women from the so-called recruitment agreement generation and a more recent wave of migrant women and expatriates who have arrived in Germany since around 2011. The selected interviewees are Anastasia Walden, Ceferina García García, and Neriman Yılmaz, representing the recruitment agreement generation, and Estre, Çağla Diner, and Maria Papadopoulou, representing the more recent wave. With two women from Spain, two from Greece, and two from Turkey, the project combines an intergenerational perspective with a comparative, transnational approach. Since all participants responded to the same set of interview questions, their experiences can be compared systematically. By examining their opportunities, challenges, legal status, employment experiences, and social acceptance in Germany, the project aims to highlight both continuities and changes in women’s migration experiences over time and across national contexts.
Prior to the interviews, preliminary personal conversations took place, during which the goals, process, and expectations were discussed transparently. The interviewees were actively involved and had a say in deciding which topics and aspects of their stories they wanted to share. The interviews were conducted in a safe environment within the museum and, where desired, in the participants’ native language in order to build trust and reduce barriers.
Sensitive topics were handled in close coordination with the participants; content could be omitted, anonymized, or adapted at any time.
How and why did you decide to publicly present the story this way?
For the presentation, a format was deliberately chosen that preserves the personal character of the stories and allows the women’s voices to be experienced directly. The combination of interviews, images, and personal materials creates a multi-layered approach that makes individual experiences visible and relatable.
The interviewees were involved in decisions regarding publication and were able to have a say in what content would be included and how their stories would be presented. This ensured that the representation reflected their perspectives and respected their autonomy.
At the same time, the project sees itself as a curatorial process that is always shaped by selection and classification. This responsibility is consciously reflected upon in order to present the stories in a respectful and context-sensitive way. In doing so, the project acknowledges existing power dynamics and seeks to reduce barriers through participation and transparency.
Particular emphasis is placed on protecting the participants: issues relating to data protection and publication are communicated clearly and agreed upon jointly. The aim is also to make the content as accessible as possible, especially for the communities involved, and to ensure open access to these stories.
What is the motivation and benefit for the person/community sharing the story? How did you negotiate this and take it into consideration?
Throughout the project, care was taken to ensure that both the cooperating partners and the interviewees benefited from their involvement. The cooperation partners received a fee for their conceptual and organizational contributions, recognizing their expertise and commitment. The interviewees were offered an expense allowance to acknowledge their time, their willingness to participate, and their openness in sharing personal stories.
In addition, the participating associations and institutions benefit from long-term networking with the museum, as well as from the opportunity to make their own perspectives and topics visible and to contribute them to cultural processes. For the interviewees, alongside the financial recognition, the main benefit lies in the visibility of their life stories.
Overall, the project aims to foster a partnership of equals that encompasses both intangible and tangible forms of recognition and strengthens sustainable relationships between institutions and communities.
What questions and challenges arose during the processes?
A key challenge in the project was multilingualism, which is also a major strength. The linguistic diversity of the interviewees reflects their different migration experiences and helped create a trusting and comfortable atmosphere during the conversations. At the same time, it presented practical challenges, particularly in terms of translation and subtitling. This process required a sensitive approach in order to convey meanings as accurately as possible. Thanks to close collaboration with the project partners, this process was successfully carried out as they contributed both their linguistic and cultural expertise.
Credits
Interview
Conducted on 12 February 2026 at Ruhr Museum, Essen. © Ruhr Museum
Texts
The texts were created with the involvement of Çağla Diner.
We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to Çağla Diner for sharing her story and memories with us. Together with five other interviewees from Spain, Greece, and Turkey, she contributes to an intergenerational and transnational interview project exploring women’s migration experiences in Germany.
The conception and implementation of the interview project were carried out by Ruhr Museum (Meltem Küçükyılmaz) in cooperation with Spanischer Elternverein Essen e. V. (Cristina Fernández-Moser), HistAgoge | Geschichtsforschung (Spiridon Papaioannou), and mitMach Agentur (Mustafa Mert).
Picture
Privat photo © Çağla Diner
Transcipt PDF here.
Partner involved
Ruhr Museum
An orange-glowing staircase and 6,000 exhibits in a spectacular industrial setting: The Ruhr Museum’s permanent exhibition at the Zollverein UNESCO World Heritage Site shows the fascinating natural and cultural history of one of the world’s largest industrial regions.
The Regional Museum of the Ruhr Area shows in its permanent exhibition the entire natural and cultural history of the region from the formation of coal over 300 million years ago to today’s structural change to the Ruhr metropolis. Visitors follow the former path of the coal and descend deeper and deeper from the present into the history of the Ruhr region. Over three levels, they pass through windowless bunkers, huge industrial machines, raw concrete walls and conveyor belts. In between, 6,000 exhibits show in often fascinating detail how a formerly agricultural region developed into Europe’s largest coal and steel production area and then became the Metropole Ruhr.
Footnotes
- Ten women born in Turkey, most of whom migrated to Germany over the past decade, connected through one of these networks and launched the podcast series Göç Notları. Through their conversations, they reflect on the challenges of re-socialization and the ongoing process of negotiating a “new” place and identity in German society. In doing so, they aim to intervene in the production of knowledge on recent migrants from Turkey by centering their own voices and experiences. Link to the podcast Göç Notları: https://open.spotify.com/show/2XRPF6VyxFmfznwiQEi4tR ↩︎