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Elif Babül is a political and legal anthropologist who specializes in national and transnational bureaucracies, migration management, and the politics of human rights in Turkey. Her research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Research Institute in Turkey. Her work has appeared in the American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, New Perspectives on Turkey, Social Anthropology, and the Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute, in addition to several edited volumes in Turkish and English.

Her book , published in 2017 by Stanford University Press, won the 2018 William A. Douglass Prize for the best book in Europeanist Anthropology; and received an honorable mention in the 2019 AAA Middle East Section biennial book award competition. Based on extensive field research over two years, the book traces Turkey’s legal and governmental “harmonization” with the European Union (EU) by focusing on a key site of bureaucratic reform – human rights education for Turkish government workers. Contrary to the belief that EU accession is a linear progressive path for the advancement of human rights and democracy, Babül’s research shows that harmonization is in fact a much more ambivalent process that incites professional governmental workers to adhere to human rights, all the while bringing the bureaucratization of human rights standards and countering the radical transformative force of grassroots activism in the country.

Currently, Babül is working on the intersection of migration management and the legal-juridical field in Turkey, exploring how the judiciary emerges as a site to both administer the government policy on migration, as well as clean up the messes that arise from discrepancies between official policy, institutional practices, and government rhetoric. Her research traces the consequences of the newly reformed legal-administrative framework for migration management through the cases that arrive in administrative, criminal, and family courts.

Babül is also co-editing a volume on "Fact and Fabulation: Knowledge in the Era of Post-Truth" that investigates how anthropologists can map a nuanced spectrum of responses to contemporary discussions of reality, truth, factuality, and evidence invoked by what is considered to be a global wave of “post-truth.” 

At Mount Holyoke, Babül teaches classes in political and legal anthropology, anthropology of human rights, ethnographic research methods and writing, Middle Eastern societies and cultures, and Muslim minorities in Europe and the U.S.