Başak Sarac̣-Lesavre

Başak is a Research Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at The University of Manchester. In a period marked by human intervention into deep time, her major area of work involves examining how people, communities, and experts deal with what contemporary societies leave behind, and attempt to establish good and desirable relations between the present and far futures. She questions: How are responsibilities defined, delimited, and assigned? As a result of which negotiations and controversies? And which trajectories do their definitions follow over time? Başak received an MRes from the LSE, before receiving a Fulbright scholarship and becoming a Visiting Fellow in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris. In 2016, she held an assistant professorship position on a post-doctoral appointment within the same institution where she analysed European post-Fukushima nuclear stress-tests, and in 2017, she joined Virginia Tech’s Department of Science, Technology, and Society, where she examined post-Fukushima nuclear emergency response initiatives on a NSF-funded research project. Her upcoming book traces how a series of exceptional measures, temporal bridges, have been designed to make the -almost eternal- temporality of nuclear waste discernible for contemporary American society. Read more about Başak

See publications from The Beam team

Online seminar series exploring the ways in which the unknown is rendered knowable

The Beam are delighted to announce the arrival of research associate Başak Sarac̣-Lesavre!