Understanding a Digital Community Page of Migrant Women From Turkey as a Counterspace

Digital platforms increasingly shape how migrant women form communities and make sense of transnational lives. Although women's and migrants’ engagement with social media have been extensively studied, less attention has been paid to how digital communities of migrant women can operate as counterspaces, understood as responses to distress caused by experiences of marginalization. In this study, Migrant Women , a public Instagram page created by and for migrant women from Turkey living abroad with over 20,000 followers, is examined. The aim is to understand how multiple subject positions become grounds for a digital counterspace and how care and solidarity are enacted here. Drawing on counterspace scholarship, reflexive thematic analysis is adopted, examining multimodal content shared on Migrant Women between 2019 and 2024, including posts, captions, hashtags, co-posts with members, and curated story highlights. The findings identify three interrelated themes whereby Migrant Women can be defined as a counterspace: (1) making migrant womanhood a shared subject position, (2) community care as gendered psychosocial infrastructure, and (3) belonging through solidarity and the selectiveness of “we.” This study highlights the possibilities of this counterspace for and beyond the community, especially regarding the reconfiguration of community through the digital mediation and transnational reimagination of a counterspace.