Başak Ertür is Reader in Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on legal and political violence, performativity, and more broadly on law's epistemologies and aesthetics. Prior to joining the Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) at Goldsmiths, she taught at Birkbeck Law School for over a decade.
Başak is an interdisciplinary and critical legal scholar whose work combines a focus on aesthetic and ethical dimensions of law, legal forms and methods, with critical attention to political practices of resistance in negotiating legal violence. Her research 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.
Başak has 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.’
