Department of Anthropology
Monday, February 26, 2024 - 12:00pm
Penn Museum 345
This talk explores how the legal-juridical field emerges as a key mechanism for migration management in Turkey - to both administer the government policy on migration, and to clean up the messes that arise from discrepancies between official policy, institutional practices, and government rhetoric. Based on field research in administrative and criminal courts in Istanbul alongside lawyers who represent documented and undocumented immigrants/asylum seekers/refugees, Babül asks: What are the thresholds and processes through which the “legal truth” about different cases gets established? How does “legal truth” correspond to the multiple facets of migrant reality? How do various operators of the legal-juridical field negotiate their multiple positionalities informed by professional ethos, political conviction, private beliefs, and practical requirements while producing legal argumentation, reasoning, and judgement on this very polarized topic?