Defne is a political and cultural sociologist who serves as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at Texas A&M University. Her research explores how political power is constructed, legitimized, and contested, with a primary empirical focus on contemporary autocratization, democratic backsliding, and social movements. Using an interdisciplinary framework, her scholarship brings sociological perspectives into conversation with global debates across public law, communication, and political science.
Her empirical inquiries frequently investigate the societal mechanisms that facilitate or resist authoritarian shifts, tracking how legal institutions and media structures adapt to changing political regimes. Her work on autocratic legalism and the weaponization of state mechanisms examines how formal legal procedures are manipulated to consolidate power. Her book, Boundaries That Divide: How Journalists in Turkey Surrendered Their Power Over Politics (2026), provides a critical socio-legal analysis of democratic decline. The study demonstrates how a country’s news media can become a functional accomplice to backsliding rather than serving as an institutional check on executive overreach. Her broader peer-reviewed research, published in journals such as Law and Social Inquiry and Social & Legal Studies, maps the legacies of specialized courts and mass mobilization dynamics.