Kasimir is a DPhil candidate in Sociology at Nuffield College. His research is supported by an ESRC grant and centers around voluntary organizations and their role in promoting social cohesion. He asks two questions tapping into inequalities in voluntary participation and their potential to bridge social divides: (i) Who is involved? and (ii) Who else is involved?

One of his papers (joint work with Hanno Kruse, University of Amsterdam) shows how adolescents reduce their participation as they grow older, and that socioeconomic disparities are largest at younger ages. The socioeconomic gap in participation decreases in size, in part because adolescents with a high socioeconomic background disproportionally undergo transitions to higher tertiary education which are most disruptive for their involvement in voluntary associations. In his other DPhil papers, he studies gender segregation in voluntary organizations, the impact of voluntary involvement on individuals’ network structures and social capital, as well as ethnic segregation across and within voluntary organizations. In an additional project, He describes volunteering dynamics in the United Kindom during the COVID-19 pandemic. Together with Dingeman Wiertz and Jochem Tolsma, he received a grant to carry out a conjoint experiment on the Dutch LISS panel, which will help to advance his research agenda on civic organizations.

More recently, he also started studying union formation patterns among the second generation using Dutch register data. Next to my research, he also taught tutorials and seminars on Introduction to Sociology, Sociological Theory and Introductory Statistics.

Prior to starting his DPhil at the University of Oxford, he graduated from the University of Cologne in Germany with a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Social Sciences and Sociology, respectively. During this time, He visited the universities of Groningen and Oxford for one semester each and worked as a research assistant at the Institute of Sociology and Social Psychology at the University of Cologne. Currently, He is visiting the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute and Utrecht University (invited by Frank van Tubergen).

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