Mohammad Khalilian

Mohammad Khalilian is a fourth-year Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Kentucky. His research is at the intersection of state violence, cultural production, and social networks. Currently, he uses computational methods to explore the impact of state violence on social systems, as well as how it is contested within them.

His dissertation focuses on the post-revolutionary Iranian music scene to analyze how varying degrees of state violence shape, and are shaped by, cultural production. He studies the continuous, mutual recalibration between the two: as cultural producers adapt to systemic frictions and exogenous shocks, they also marginally alter state actions through relational processes.

Alongside this work, he applies network methods to the study of corporate power. As a Food Connection Fellow at ACRE Justice, he uses social network analysis to map ownership structures and transnational power dynamics in agricultural markets.