This lecture features a conversation with Professor Izabela Grabowska (Kozminski University).
This lecture introduces the AISOME framework—AI/Automation, Society, Migration, and Employment—as a conceptual tool for understanding how digital technologies and labour migration co-produce evolving definitions of work, skill, and human capital. Rather than isolating AI/automation, social structures, migration systems, and labour markets as discrete domains, AISOME treats them as interdependent but asymmetrically governed arenas, in which political, technological, and institutional forces recursively shape each other. This recursive interplay is not neutral: it occurs together with structural inequalities, governance asymmetries, and contested labour and migration regimes. The framework is informed by empirical findings from the Horizon Europe Link4Skills project, which investigates global migration skill corridors, automation trends, demographic change, and skill shortages across the EU and partners from Global South. The lecture discusses empirical levels and empirical examples—macro (diagnosis and scenarios for addressing skill shortages), meso (migration skill corridors), and micro (human-skilled migrant perspective). AISOME thus offers a heuristic lens—not a totalising theory—for interrogating how emerging forms of intelligence, labour governance, and migration regimes interact. It contributes to ongoing debates on the future of work, digital sovereignty, and migration justice. Rather than proposing fixed solutions, it raises critical questions in the spirit of Max Weber’s sociology of rationalisation:
- What forms of control and inclusion/exclusion are embedded in labour and migration regimes?
- Who defines 'valuable' skills to fill in shortages?
This framework can help EU policymakers anticipate labour market polarisation and improve the design of re/up-skilling programs by accounting for migrant agency and automation.
Speaker:
Professor Izabela Grabowska is a sociologist and economist, and a full professor in social sciences. She earned her PhD from the Department of Economics at the University of Warsaw and holds master’s degrees in economic sciences from University College Dublin and in sociology from the University of Wroclaw; she holds habilitation degree in sociology. From September to November 2025, Izabela Grabowska is the SPS Fernand Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. Professor Izabela Grabowska is Scientific Coordinator of Horizon Europe Link4Skills global project on addressing skill shortages through reskilling, retraining, automation, migration www.link4skill.eu. She is also co-author (together with Prof. Aleksandra Przegalinska) of European University Alliance EUonAIR: AI in Curricula, Smart UniverCity and Return Mobility www.euonair.eu coordinated by Kozminski University in Warsaw.
Since 2021, she has worked at the Department of Economics at Kozminski University, where she founded and directs Centre for Research on Social Change and Human Mobility (CRASH) | Kozminski University. From 2016 to 2021, she served as Director of the Interdisciplinary Doctoral School at SWPS University in Warsaw. Between 2002 and 2018, she was a Research Fellow at the Centre of Migration Research in Warsaw, where she now serves on the Scientific Board. She was also a member of the Executive Board and Board of Directors of IMISCOE (International Migration, Integration and Social Cohesion in Europe) from 2008 to 2018. Professor Grabowska is a national expert for the European Commission, contributing to initiatives such as ESCO, the European Mobility Partnership, and currently the European Labour Agency (EURES European Employment Services). Her research focuses on migration, labour markets, human mobility, and social change. She is the co-author of several monographs, including Ukrainian Female War Migrants: Mobilising Resources for Prospective Social Remittance (with I. Kyliushyk and E. Chrol, Routledge, 2025), Migration and the Transfer of Informal Human Capital: Insights from Central Europe and Mexico (with A. Jastrzebowska, Routledge, 2022), The Impact of Migration on Poland: EU Mobility and Social Change (with A. White, P. Kaczmarczyk, and K. Slany, UCL Press, 2018), and Migrants as Agents of Change (with M. Garapich, E. Jazwinska, and U. Radziwinowiczowna, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She also co-edited Mobility in Transition: Migration Patterns After EU Enlargement (Amsterdam University Press, 2013). Professor Grabowska has led numerous international research projects, including studies on migration transition from emigration to immigration country, migrants’ social mobility, social remittances, peer groups and migration, migrants and Brexit, and TCN migrant integration within the Horizon 2020 MIMY project.
She is the author or co-author of more than 60 publications on labour migration, social change, return migration and skills. More information is available at www.izabelagrabowska.org. She can be contacted at [email protected] and I[email protected] (till November 2025).
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