INTERACT conversations #16

Freie Universität Berlin, Ihnestraße 21 Hörsaal A, 14195 Berlin, 4 May 2026, 16:00

Political Trials, Performativity, Hyperlegality
A conversation with Dr. Başak Ertür

As part of the INTERACT conversation series, we welcome Dr. Başak Ertür to discuss her work on political trials, performativity and hyperlegality. Together we explore how the concept of legal performativity reshapes our understanding of trials as well as the practice of trial observation. Moving beyond the spectacle of “classical” political trials, it contrasts these with more recent “hyperlegal” prosecutions—procedurally dense, often opaque cases such as those involving the criminalisation of solidarity and protest.

The conversation will take place in English and is organized by Dr. Hannah Franzki, head of the Research Group “Blurring Boundaries” in the context of ongoing research on the criminal prosecution of protests in solidarity with Palestine.

About the speaker:

Dr. Başak Ertür is a Reader at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths and a Research Fellow at Forensic Architecture. She is the author of Spectacles and Specters: A Performative Theory of Political Trials (2022) which was awarded the 2024 SLSA Socio-Legal Theory and History Prize. Her work is engaged with questions of legal violence, legal performativity, and more broadly with law's epistemologies and aesthetics. Her writing has appeared in Critical Times, Law & Critique, Theory & Event, Aut aut and across several edited volumes. She has held a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2023-24), was a CAPES/PRINT Visiting Professor at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 2022, and received the Association for the Study of Law Culture and the Humanities Julien Mezey Dissertation Award in 2016.