gökhan mülayim

I am an Assistant Teaching Professor of Sociology at Montana State University, where I have taught since 2025. I earned my Ph.D. in Sociology from Boston University. Before that, I received a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations and an M.A. in Sociology from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul. My research and teaching draw on economic and cultural sociology, the sociology of organizations and work, and questions of power and inequality.

My research spans four related clusters. The first concerns markets and organizations. I am interested in how goods and services with social, political, and affective significance come to be bought and sold, and in the organizational work that makes those exchanges possible. In my dissertation, I use ethnographic research in Istanbul’s private security industry to examine how security is made into a commercial service and provided in practice. Security remains tied to ideas of protection, authority, trust, and public responsibility even as firms sell it in a market. This project informs my broader interest in how forms of value often treated as “extra-economic” enter economic life and how markets for such goods and services operate.

The second cluster centers on work and precarity. Drawing in part on my research with private security workers, I examine how work arrangements and organizational expectations produce insecurity and how workers navigate it in their daily lives. I am interested in what uncertain work means for people’s decisions, relationships, and understanding of their own roles. This empirical concern has also led me to study precarity as a concept. I ask how the term is defined and used across different settings, what forms of insecurity it brings into view, and what differences may be lost when distinct experiences are grouped under one label.

The third cluster concerns organizations and alternative organizing. In coauthored research on political organizations, I study how informal financial contributions sustain political activity and how dependence on resources shapes organizational practices and relationships. Another part of this cluster explores forms of organizing oriented toward degrowth and sustainability. I am interested in how groups put different economic and political commitments into practice, coordinate their work, and obtain the resources they need to continue. Together, these lines of research ask how an organization’s goals and material conditions shape what it can do.

The fourth cluster focuses on cultural power and resistance. My research on Kurdish publishing in Turkey examines how political and institutional conditions shape the production and circulation of Kurdish-language books. I am interested in how publishers sustain their work when questions of language, legitimacy, and access to readers are politically contested. This project considers how cultural power operates through the practical decisions involved in publishing, and how those decisions can become part of a broader struggle over identity and recognition.

Across these projects, I use qualitative methods, including ethnography, in-depth interviews, and the analysis of documents and other secondary materials. I have worked with both single-site and multi-site research designs. These methods allow me to study everyday practices closely while tracing their connections to markets, institutions, and wider political conditions.

My teaching areas include introductory sociology and sociological theory; social problems, crime, and inequality; and economic sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of organizations. Before joining Montana State University, I taught at Boston University, Boston College, Boğaziçi University, and Truman State University.

Editorial and professional service have been another part of my academic work. From 2020 to 2024, I served as chief editor of Accounts, the newsletter of the American Sociological Association’s Economic Sociology Section. I was an elected member of the section’s council for the 2022–2023 term. I also served as a graduate editorial intern for Socio-Economic Review and helped organize SER Café, which brings the journal’s authors into conversation with readers. At Boston University, I co-organized the Sociology Seminar Series and was a graduate affiliate of the Center for Innovation in Social Science and the Precarity Lab.

Outside academia, I have worked on several collaborative research projects addressing political culture and social inequality. I participated in KONDA’s “Understanding the Political Universe of Turkey Through Emotions and Affects,” a large-scale qualitative study of political polarization, and coauthored a report in its report series. I contributed to research projects on economic crisis and emotions, women’s poverty, transit migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, and gender-sensitive data and statistical capacity development. The transit migration and gender data projects received support from the Berlin Institute for Integration and Migration Research and UN Women, respectively.