Seminars & Events

2 November 2015
15:15 - 17:00
Ruppert-building, room Red

Seminar: Izabela Grabowska – University of Warsaw

Putting the individual back in the frame. Mechanisms of social remittances in an enlarged European Union.


Abstract
The concept of social remittances, coined by Levitt (1998), induced many scholarly reactions, and opened up a whole new research landscape, but its mechanism was rarely clearly defined or operationalised. Based on the original data gathered during a multi-sited transnational qualitative panel between the United Kingdom and Poland this aims to reconstruct the primary factors of the social remitting mechanism: acquisition, transfer and outcomes and their diffusion, triggering several identifiable modes: resistance, imitation and innovation. We distinguish several stages of social remitting mechanism and its modes, and develop some hypotheses on how the mechanism of social remitting operates within European context at the same time bringing into the social remittances literature a much needed emphasis on individual agency and its structural limitations.

Key words: social remittances, transfer, resistance, imitation, innovation, key individual


Bio

Professor Izabela Grabowska visits ERCOMER from September 2015 to February 2016; she is International Research Coordinator at the Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw. She is professor at University of Social Sciences and Humanities (University SWPS in Warsaw). She is a Deputy Chair of IMISCOE Research Network Board of Directors and member of Executive Board. She took part in the international research consortia of 6 FP of the EU: in IDEA Project (coordinated labour market part) and PROMINSTAT (external expert). She was also the expert of The European Commission, DG Employment, Labour Market Unit in The Mobility Laboratory (2009-2014) and The WEESP (Web-tool for Evaluated Employment Services Practices, 2012-2013) and The European Vacancy Monitor (2012-2013). Currently she is the national expert of ESCO classification. Professor Grabowska since 2010 has been also an expert-lecturer at Ernst&Young Business School in Bologna in the training programme for Public Employment Services, EURES. She also collaborates occasionally with the International Organisation for Migration (IOM, LINET Network). She publishes extensively on labour market, social and spatial mobility and social remittances. Her professorship monograph was devoted to social mobility of migrants (2012).

There are two forthcoming monographs of Izabela Grabowska:

Grabowska I. (forthcoming). Movers and Stayers: Social Mobility, Migration and Skills, Frankfurt Am Main: Peter Lang.

Grabowska I., Garapich M.P., Jazwinska E., Radziwinowicz Agnieszka (2016). Migrants as Agents of Change. Social Remittances in an Enlarged European Union, Basingstoke/London: Palgrave Macmillan.

More at: www.izabelagrabowska.com


grabowskaIzabela Grabowska
Professor
Centre of Migration Research, University of Warsaw
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw
i.grabowska@uw.edu.pl