Başak's research focuses on law's epistemologies and legal aesthetics.
I am a critical legal scholar based at the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA). My research focuses on legal and political violence, performativity, and more broadly on law's epistemologies and aesthetics. Prior to joining the CRA, I taught at Birkbeck Law School for a decade.
I am away this academic year on research leave as a Leverhulme Research Fellow (2023-24) working on a book about people's tribunals and counter-forensics. I will return in October 2024 as the convenor for the new MRes in Forensic Architecture.
I am an interdisciplinary and critical legal scholar with an intellectual home in the BritCrit tradition of general jurisprudence – a body of scholarship combining a strong methodological focus on aesthetic and ethical dimensions of law, legal forms and methods, with critical attention to political practices of resistance in negotiating legal violence. My work is informed by humanities approaches to law, and has primarily focused on investigating the entanglements of law and political violence, the relationship between law, memory and history, and law’s epistemologies and aesthetics.
My book Spectacles and Specters (2022) is a work of critical legal theory that draws on legal history, philosophy of language, deconstruction, political theory, and addresses questions of historiography. My current research and forthcoming publications are focused on the themes of the relationship between legal factuality and public truth, counter-forensics, investigatory aesthetics, and rethinking the forum as a collective space of judgment. I have been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-24) to complete my next book.
I have published articles and book chapters on a range of topics including: conceptualising and studying state violence; academic freedom in the War on Terror; genocide denialism and memory laws; filmic representations of transgender bodies before the law; counter-monumental practices of resistance; conspiracy theories and the law; the ‘deep state’; and on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on the relationship between law and violence, ‘Toward the Critique of Violence.’
Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2023-24
CAPES/PRINT Visiting Professor, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, 2022
Julien Mezey Dissertation Award, Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities, 2016
Ertür, Başak. 2022. Spectacles and specters: a performative theory of political trials. New York: Fordham University Press. ISBN 9781531501877
Sökmen, Müge G. and Ertür, Başak, eds. 2017. Warten auf die Barbaren: Zum Gedenken an Edward W. Said. Engelschoff, Germany: Verlag auf dem Ruffel. ISBN 9783933847515
Ertür, Başak, ed. 2011. Manual for conspiracy. Sharjah, UAE: Sharjah Art Foundation, pp. 29-40.
Sökmen, Müge G. and Ertür, Başak, eds. 2010. Barbarları Beklerken: Edward W. Said Anısına. Istanbul, Turkey: Metis. ISBN 9789753426817
Ertür, Başak and Martel, James, eds. 2016. Something is Rotten in the State, Theory & Event, 19(1). 2572-6633
Lebow, Alisa and Ertür, Başak. 2021. ‘Wo beginnen’ [‘Where to Begin? Revision as Method’]. In: Nicole Wolf, ed. Grenzfälle:Dokumentarische Praxis zwischen Film und Literatur bei Merle Kröger und Philip Scheffner [Borderline Cases: Documentary practice between film and literature with Merle Kröger and Philip Scheffner]. Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8. ISBN 9783947238354
Ertür, Başak; Butler, Judith and Athanasiou, Athena. 2017. Türkçe Basıma Sunuş: Çeviride Mülksüzleşme. In: Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, eds. Mülksüzleşme Siyasaldaki Performatif. Istanbul, Turkey: Metis, pp. 9-21.
Ertür, Başak. 2016. Barricades: resources and residues of resistance. In: Judith Butler; Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, eds. Vulnerability in Resistance. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, pp. 97-121. ISBN 9780822362906
Ertür, Başak. 2020. La barricade. Techniques & Culture(74), pp. 72-73. ISSN 0248-6016
Ertür, Başak. 2019. Note sulla difficoltà di scrivere a proposito della violenza di Stato. Aut aut(384), ISSN 0005-0601
Ertür, Başak. 2019. Conscription and Critique. Critical Times, 2(2), pp. 270-284. ISSN 2641-0478
Dadak, Zeynep; Ertür, Başak; Köstepen, Enis and Lebow, Alisa. 2007. For the record: The World Tribunal on Iraq.
Ertür, Başak. 2009. Report on the First Ergenekon Indictment. Technical Report. Amnesty International.
Ertür, Başak. 2015. Spectacles and spectres: political trials, performativity and scenes of sovereignty. Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London
Ertür, Başak. 2019. Law of Denial: The Armenian Genocide at the European Court of Human Rights. Critical Legal Thinking.
Butler, Judith and Ertür, Başak. 2017. In Turkey, academics asking for peace are accused of terrorism. The Guardian, London.
Ertür, Başak. 2012. Plenty of History. Manifesta Journal #15, Amsterdam.
2022:
Book Launch for Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials
Başak Ertür with Anthony Alessandrini and Judith Butler at Book Culture, NYC
