From local solidarities to collective voice: Women’s cooperatives and grassroots advocacy in Türkiye

Overview

This paper analyses how organising-oriented women’s cooperatives in Türkiye, founded largely by women from lower socio-economic backgrounds, have evolved into sites of grassroots advocacy where marginalised women articulate collective interests. The analysis draws on semi-structured interviews with 15 cooperatives, alongside documents from women’s cooperative meetings. Building on Bayat’s (2000, 2013) framework of quiet encroachment, and its extension by Hayes-Conroy et al. (2020), the paper interprets everyday practices of solidarity and organising within cooperatives as struggles for gender equality. By reworking affective atmospheres shaped by fear and isolation into relations of trust and belonging, and by normalising women’s collective presence in public space through everyday spatial practices, these cooperatives quietly yet persistently expand the conditions of political possibility. Convocational networking further links local initiatives to broader infrastructures, enabling dispersed practices to coalesce into a collective voice. In doing so, cooperatives tactically repurpose entrepreneurial tools and care-based organisational forms, gaining legitimacy within state discourses while redirecting these instruments towards improving everyday conditions of dignity and recognition. Ultimately, the paper contributes to debates on feminist advocacy by foregrounding locally embedded, everyday practices through which marginalised women articulate claims to rights and participation, offering insights for both scholars and practitioners.