Ece Gurleyik

Ece's research sits at the intersection of critical media studies, visual culture, and legal anthropology. At a time when authoritarianism and its structural absurdities have become increasingly commonplace, she asks how states govern through mediatic regimes that extend beyond formal political institutions. She examines how semiotics, visual discourse, and law produce political reality, focusing on how everyday forms of mediation—from colors and symbols to acts of documentation—become terrains where the authority to define what is real is exercised and contested.

Drawing on Turkey, she investigates how states exploit the ambiguity of “terror” in counterterrorism discourse and law to recast expressions of marginalized identities and documentation of state violence as evidence of “terrorist” affiliation or intent. Her work also examines how these practices extend into the governance of environmental crises and moments of mass violence.

Her article, “Authoritarian Legality as Legal Unknowability (Meçhullük): Criminalising the Visual Documentation of State Violence in Turkey’s Anti-Terror Prosecutions,” was published in Social & Legal Studies in 2026.