dr. AM (Agnieszka) Kanas

Biography

I am an Associate Professor in the Policy, Politics and Society team at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Erasmus University Rotterdam. My research lies at the intersection of social stratification, migration, and public policy. I examine how institutional contexts interact with individual resources to shape inequalities across national, local, and organizational contexts.

My current research develops three interrelated lines. The first examines how asylum, reception, and integration policies, together with local opportunity structures, shape refugees’ skills, labor-market outcomes, and institutional experiences. The second focuses on how organizational and frontline processes contribute to inequalities, examining caseworker decisions about access to active labor-market measures and employers’ responses to immigrants’ participation in these programs. The third takes a comparative institutional perspective, examining how national policy and institutional arrangements interact with individual resources to shape ethnic and gender inequalities across European labor markets.

Across these lines, my research links macro-level institutions to the organizations and actors through which policies are implemented and to the individuals whose opportunities they shape. I use longitudinal and comparative data, survey experiments, and quasi-experimental designs, with a particular interest in estimating policy and institutional effects and identifying the mechanisms through which they operate. My work has been published in journals including Social Forces, European Sociological Review, Governance, Sociological Science, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, and International Migration Review.

At Erasmus University Rotterdam, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on public policy, migration and diversity, and social inequality.