项目介绍

2026年11月7日

This fully funded four-year PhD position is part of an ERC Starting Grant ‘Migrant Labor in EU’s Pivot to Digital Autonomy’ funded by the European Research Council and led by Dr. Julia Rone at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

The broader ERC project develops new explanations of how the EU (and individual member states) change labour migration policies to further their digital industrial policy ambitions. The project will offer a novel theorization of how the governance of labour migration intersects with digital capitalism, positioning the EU and its member states as active “catching-up” actors.

The project is structured around four interlinked objectives:

1. to conceptualize and map migrant labour across the digital stack in the EU, with a focus on flagship EU projects on networks, semiconductor chips, cloud, and AI.
2. to analyse the strategic interactions between firms, trade unions, and policy makers in shaping digital labour migration regimes
3. to analyse how migrant workers themselves experience, assess and (fail to) shape labour policies and workplace conditions in digital industry across the stack
4. to advance a meso- and macro-level theorization of the (re)configuration of labour migration regimes in service of digital capitalism.

The PhD project
The PhD project will primarily contribute to Objectives 2 and 4. Your research will examine specifically how policy makers, employers and trade unions interact to decide who counts as a high-skilled, mid-skilled and low-skilled migrant in the digital industrial sector, what rules apply to them, and what rights they have. The main sectors analysed will be strategic priority sectors in EU digital industrial policy, including networks, semiconductor chips, cloud, and AI.

The project will involve a cross-national comparative policy analysis, process tracing, and qualitative interviews. Experience with survey methods will be a plus but is not essential.

Your duties
As a PhD candidate, you will complete a cumulative PhD dissertation within four years, consisting of four publishable journal articles. Working closely with your supervisory team, led by Dr. Julia Rone, and in collaboration with the ERC research team, which includes two other postdoctoral researchers, you will play an integral role in advancing Objectives 2 and 4 of the ERC project.

As part of your PhD, you will conduct comparative cross-national analyses on labour migration policies in the service of industrial policy, followed by a process tracing to explain the differences in the relative influence of various actors (such as employers or trade unions) in different national contexts and the EU more broadly. Your research will contribute to a broader theorization of the relation between infrastructural labour and digital capitalism in the current AI boom.

You will actively participate in the intellectual life of the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the VU, present your work at international conferences and workshops, contribute to collaborative research activities within the project, and have the opportunity to undertake research stays abroad within the project’s international network of collaborators.