Tomas Bilevicius

I am a doctoral researcher and cultural sociologist at the BRISPO research unit Childhood, Culture and Cognition. My research focuses on how children develop structured social cognition through their everyday interactions in playground settings. In my doctoral research, I collect and analyse spatio-temporal data on children's playground interactions, with particular attention to the development of socially classed patterns of interaction. I investigate how children (re)produce class society culture within the micro-field of the playground. This research also contributes to the SBO project Primary Prejudice, which examines bullying in Flemish (pre-)primary schools, with a specific focus on social exclusion as a potentially under-recognized form of bullying. Another area I have explored in depth during my master’s thesis (which remains a particular area of interest for me) is the study of classed eating practices, patterns of consumption, and the socially structured formation of food preferences and tastes.

My general theoretical orientation spans the sociology of childhood, cultural and cognitive sociology, social theory, social class, and the sociology of consumption. Methodologically, I am interested in relational socio-statistical approaches, with a particular emphasis on geometric data analysis techniques. In my research, I aim to adopt a mixed-methods perspective, grounded in the belief that methodological choices in sociology should be theoretically informed and aligned with the epistemological foundations of the research.

I received my bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and my master’s degree in Sociology and Social Research from the Università degli Studi di Trento. 

Finally, I am a teaching assistant at the Department of Sociology, where I teach courses Current Issues II and Critical Thinking in Sociology.