Berkant Caglar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. His dissertation is tentatively titled “Contested Legalities and Harmful Judiciary: Queer Justice and Legal Activism in Turkish Courtrooms”. Intrigued by the unique challenges faced by queer individuals in their interactions with the state’s judiciary, his research critically examines the legal activism of queer pro-bono lawyers and sheds light on secular legal infrastructures. It attends to a wide variety of litigation processes for cases involving queer claimants and defendants in the domains such as legal standing, right to protest, public decency, and hate crime. In addition to this dissertation research, his ongoing minor project focuses on denialism as a governing category in post-genocidal Turkey. In his DAAD-sponsored residency, he is affiliated with the Integrative Research Institute Law and Society and the Center for Comparative Research on Democracy.