The Infrastructure of a Local Weaving Practice: Community Relationships for a Participatory Capacity

Abstract

The women in Karşıyaka village in Turkey weave rugs and bags together in the streets to contribute to the shared social convention of preparing dowries. From assembling looms to distributing woven goods, weaving in the village is a cooperative designing and making process that is deeply intertwined with social and material relationships. This article explores embodied knowledge in these women’s weaving practices, and the different forms of relationships that enable participatory and cooperative capacity among the group. To consider these relationships, we bring together two frameworks: the ecological approach (examining practices as relational entities that are co-constituted through social, material, and cultural environments) and participatory design, particularly in terms of community-building and infrastructuring (the design and arrangement of socio-technical resources that engage and establish the network of relationships). This article demonstrates a local understanding of building participation and cooperation through co-constitutive and interdependent relationships between social and material elements of making, and of the facilitation of cooperation.

Keywords:

• local knowledge
• cooperation and participation
• weaving
• infrastructuring
• attachments

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the women of Karşıyaka village for their hospitality and patience in our involvement in their daily life. We thank Aysun Akdeniz and her family for opening their home during field visits. This article was developed at the Emerging Scholar Workshop. The workshop was an incredible learning process for the corresponding author as an early career scholar. Thanks to the coordinators for such an initiative and their time and effort. This paper is derived from Gizem’s Ph.D. thesis. We thank jury members Can Altay and Hümanur Bağlı for their contribution and support. We wholeheartedly thank and are deeply grateful to Leslie Atzmon for her patient and kind editing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interview with a woman weaver, Karşıyaka, July 18, 2018.

2 Fieldnotes, Karşıyaka, August 18, 2019.

3 For the conference paper on the workshop, see Öz and Ateş (2019).

4 The word “Abla” has variety of uses in Turkish. It can be used after the name of an older woman as a sign of respect.

5 For a detailed account of field relations see Öz and Timur (2022).

6 As the meanings and applications of dowry vary greatly, some aspects of them can be seen as troublesome in different geographies and histories. This work is specifically interested in designerly and communal features of dowry practice in the setting of Karşıyaka village today and does not contemplate the other ways of practicing dowry.

7 Interview with a woman weaver, Karşıyaka, July 19, 2018.

8 Fieldnotes, Karşıyaka, 2018–2019.

9 Fieldnotes, Karşıyaka, 2018–2019.

10 Fieldnotes, Karşıyaka, August 20, 2019.

11 A gathering where women pray for the health and the safety of a newborn child.

12 Parents distribute dessert to the village as a celebration of the first step their child takes. The dessert can be bought or made at home.

13 Interviews with several women weavers, Karşıyaka, 2018–2019.

14 Fieldnotes, Karşıyaka, August 20, 2019.

15 Fieldnotes, Karşıyaka, July 20, 2018.

16 Although the translation does not convey the ambience, the tone, and the rushed sense of the decision-making process, we include a very short excerpt to show a fragment of the discussions.

17 Interview with a woman weaver, Karşıyaka, July 22, 2018.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gizem Öz

Gizem Öz is a design researcher who completed her Ph.D. at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Industrial Design. She currently works as an assistant professor at Kadir Has University. Her research interests include designer’s labor, cooperative production, and ethnographic fieldwork. She attempts to look at the designer’s participation in production from a critical perspective. [email protected].

Şebnem Timur

Şebnem Timur, Ph.D., was born in Ankara in 1974. She graduated from the Department of Industrial Design at Middle East Technical University (METU) in 1994 and received her degrees of MFA (1996) and Ph.D. (2001) from Bilkent University, Department of Graphic Design. She has worked as a research assistant at METU in the Department of Industrial Design (1995–2002) and has conducted a post-doctoral study as an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London in the Department of Anthropology on Material Culture (2002–2003). She is currently teaching at Istanbul Technical University, Department of Industrial Design. Her research interests particularly focus on design and objects as cultural phenomena at the intersection point of semiotics, material culture, and visual culture studies. [email protected].