Trajectories of Political Participation in Eventful Contexts : Cognitive, Emotional, and Relational Transformations across Protest, Pandemic, and Disaster

This dissertation examines how political participation is transformed through eventful events, within the context of Turkey’s neoliberal developmentalist and populist authoritarianism. Grounded in a relational-processual ontology, the study develops a conceptual grammar of movement derived from the Arabic root carā, consisting of cereyan (flow), mecra (channel), icra (enactment), and icraat (repeated practice) to reconceptualize participation as a temporally unfolding current rather than a static attribute. The research addresses a core empirical problem: why similar macro-level ruptures generate divergent participation trajectories, such as persistence, transfer, abeyance, or disengagement, among differently positioned actors. Drawing on 32 in-depth life-history interviews and reconstructed timelines of participants in Istanbul’s ecological food cooperatives, the study distinguishes three distinct modalities of eventfulness: fast, agency-driven protests (Gezi protests of 2013); slow eventfulness (COVID-19 of 2020); and layered eventfulness (2023 Earthquakes). The findings reveal a significant shift in repertoires of action, as institutional closure prompts a move away from state-oriented claim-making toward Direct Social Action and prefigurative, care-based practices that seek to reorganize everyday life as a political site. Through an inductive typology-building strategy, the dissertation identifies four distinct categories of actors, Newcomers, Anchors, Transformers, and the After-Gezi Generation, and traces the cognitive, emotional, and relational mechanisms that mediate their engagement. Key mechanisms identified include relational liberation, through which shared vulnerability forges solidarities across ideological divides, and structural loneliness, which acts as a trigger for engagement among youth. Ultimately, the dissertation demonstrates that while these grassroots infrastructures facilitate resilience and relational repair in eventful contexts, they remain structurally constrained and cannot dismantle systemic authoritarian structures without articulating with macro-level political power.