About

Nil Basdurak is a Ph.D. candidate in ethnomusicology in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Approaching sound as both mediated by macro-politics of the nation-state and mediating the micro-politics of everyday, her research investigates audible traces of microaggressions, identity conflicts, and power negotiations that take place daily in the socio-political geography Istanbul, Turkey. Explicitly centered on Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, her research seeks to comprehend typically overlooked correlations between adjustments and readjustments of socio-economic, cultural, and political life and sonic-spatial transformations of urban space within the last two decades. Nil regularly presents her work at the meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, and the Canadian Society for Traditional Music, among others. In 2019, with her paper titled “The Little Buskers of Istanbul: Ethico-political Soundscape of Children’s Street Labour,” she was awarded an honorable mention for the Charles Seeger Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Her article titled “The Soundscape of Islamic Populism: Auditory Publics, Silences and the Myth of Democracy” was published in The Sound Effects: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Sound and Sound Experience in 2020.