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Paper short abstract

The paper explores how women experience a Turkish-German mosque as an affective, social, and communal space, reproducing belonging through care, participation, and shared emotional life, highlighting how the mosque functions beyond a religious site and as a protective ‘home’.

Paper long abstract

Belonging is an emotionally charged social location rooted in shared practices and attachments, producing feelings of familiarity, intimacy, and emotional safety through embeddedness in a social fabric. Rather than a stable condition, belonging is continuously reproduced through everyday interactions, affective investments, and shared sociality, making emotions central to how belonging is lived.

Drawing on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in a large urban Turkish-German DITIB mosque in Germany, the paper explores how women experience the mosque as an affective, social, and communal space in which belonging is reproduced. The mosque functions beyond a religious site, as an affective and protective space where prayer and teaching are intertwined with sociality. Networks of care, trust, and reciprocity emerge through everyday interaction, religious and community gatherings, offering emotional and practical support during moments of hardship and reinforcing a shared moral and religious community, enabling women to navigate changing socio-economic conditions in Germany. Through sustained investments of time, labor, and resources, as well as practices of placemaking, women experience the mosque as a ‘home’, anchoring belonging in both interpersonal relationships and the physical and symbolic space of the mosque.

Reflecting on my positionality, the paper incorporates my own affective experience of belonging as ethnographic material, highlighting how belonging is learned through embodied participation and shared emotional life.

Ultimately, the paper argues that the mosque functions not simply as a place of worship but as an affective social space in which belonging is continuously reproduced through women’s emotional investments, everyday interaction and acts of care.