3.1 Introduction: Working with Unusual Informants

It was argued Chap. 1 that the constrained agency of elite migrant-artists has been an under-researched area. This means that there are, in fact, many unanswered provocative questions about the life and work of global elite migrants. While they belong to the category of informants whom scholars view as ‘challenging’. They are highly visible, dependent on their networks and, therefore extremely vulnerable because of their potential exposure to the public and also because of severe network sanctions. They are both privileged and vulnerable. And as noted by the famous French novelist of the nineteenth century Honoré de Balzac, it is not easy to describe in one word ‘the splendor and miseries’ of someone so controversial.Footnote 1 Therefore, the question that I would like to ask in this chapter is what would be the best way to study the lives of global elite migrants and the ontogenesis of their migrant agency with the purpose to make their voices heard and their ‘splendors and miseries’ visible. What would be the best way to think about them as professionals, migrants and real people, with all their social skills, ambitions, moments of success but also fears and insecurity? The answer is interpretive biography. Here in this chapter, I, therefore, introduce the method of interpretive biography, explain its nuances and analytical procedures, and justify its application to my case.

The chapter opens with the introduction of my case, comprised of sixty informants who are opera singers from the former Soviet bloc and global elite migrants. I elaborate the methodological design of my study, giving information on the informants, on my access to them, on the procedures of their recruitment and on the dynamics of our rapport. The following section provides the justification for applying this method to my research by showing the links between this method and the concepts of ‘migrant agency’ and ‘migrant network’, which are central in this book. I explain my own quite complex ‘researcher’ positionality in this study and the procedures of gaining the informants’ trust, which helped me to enable their story-telling.

Their provocative life stories and experiences of networking are analysed, in this book, through the interpretive techniques of ‘turning point-’ and ‘epiphany-’ analyses, and also through the use of sociological metaphor. Here in this chapter, I further elaborate the importance of looking into the most critical moments of their lives (known in methodological literatures as ‘turning points’) and the lessons they have learned about themselves from these experiences, or their ‘mini-theories’ about their own life (known as ‘epiphanies’, or epiphanic testimonies) (Denzin, 1989; Isaakyan et al., 2023).

To give my findings more analytical rigor and to explore the lived experiences of my informants more in-depth, I use my sociological imagination and apply the sociological metaphor of ‘astrogation’, which is introduced in the last section of this chapter. I compare their agency with the process of ‘astrogation’ and their complex networks with ‘celestial galaxies’ that they will be conquering in the next chapters of this book.

3.2 Hidden Lives: The Power of Interpretive Biography

When I first met Zosya in Milan, she was looking very sad, almost on the verge of tears. When I asked her about what had happened and how I could help, she raised her lachrymose eyes and exclaimed:

Just imagine, I attended the La Scala performance by a famous soprano yesterday night. Gosh, how beautiful her singing was! She is my age and she has already made such a tremendous success in global opera. This comparison makes me feel so miserable as if I were not a human being. She was there on stage so glamorous and perfect, and I was sitting in the gallery so tiny and unsuccessful, not wanted by theaters, having technical issues with my voice – just a tiny miserable migrant from Ukraine, whose story will never be known. I am not even sure if someone might find my story interesting.

Zosya’s story is, in fact, very interesting to read. It is powerful in its own way, by showing the life of a lonely, naïve, vulnerable yet very brave person who is desperately trying to become an opera star. It is the story that shows the life of a talented artist from the former Soviet bloc who travelled to Italy almost illegally because she was sure that she would sing in La Scala one day. It is the story of a global elite migrant, like the many other stories that I am analysing in this book.

3.2.1 Sixty ‘Elite Respondents’ and One Researcher

This book is based on interpretive biographic interviews with sixty opera singers from seven former Soviet republics, which after the Soviet collapse in 1991 became the Newly Independent States. The interpretive biographic method does not only allow to understand a specific phenomenon—such as elite migration or elite networking—through biographic experience but also to see individual and collective experiences from a dynamic and interactive perspective. This method enables our exploration and understanding of controversial stories like that of Zosya, with whom I had talked for more than three hours in that Milanese café and who was eventually persuaded that her life was important to me and to many others who would read this book. That was the year 2017. Since then she and I have been constantly in touch. I have been updating her on the progress of this book while she has been sharing with me additional insights on her daily experiences. As noted by Norman Denzin (2014), if the researcher wants to understand the human experience, s/he should spend a lot of time with his/her informant.

Based on this advice, all my interviews lasted for two-four hours. I really enjoyed talking to my informants about their lives, their work, opera and life in general. The majority of the interviews were conducted in 2016–2019. A few additional encounters with informants like Zosya (with whom I had developed a deep rapport) took place also in 2020–2022. At the moment of the interview, my informants were either finishing their studies in Italy or already working there, while also circulating between Italy and other countries.

My informants come from the former Soviet republics that are especially known for supreme quality of operatic education and training. Twenty-five people are originally from Russia, eleven from Ukraine, seven from Georgia, five from Belarusy, five from Kazakhstan, four from Armenia and three from Moldova. Russian informants prevail, given the size of Russia’s territory and the large number of its conservatories and theaters. The prevalence is also explained by the geo-political characteristics of the post-Soviet space such as the porousness of its borders and the circulation of artistic talent within it.

In gender terms, there are forty women and twenty men. This is justified by the 2/3 ratio of male-female voice divisions and consequently the 2/3 ratio of male-female leading/secondary roles in opera. These ratios structure the operatic migration since global migrant-singers are those who migrate to take leading or secondary roles at destination.

The informants were selected through the strategies of purposeful sampling (matching a specific criterion) and snowballing (following a personal reference). As the main criterion of their recruitment and selection, I was looking for people who had migrated from former Soviet republics in pursuit of their transnational operatic careers within the period between 2004 and 2019. The chosen time frame was important for the following two reasons. First, it relates to the pre-pandemic wave of post-Soviet operatic emigration to Europe. Second, I sought to locate informants who had migrated prior to 2019 so they would be based in Europe for at least two years at the moment of the interview. This allowed me to grasp dynamics in their careers and networking. Later, I conducted a few additional interviews with ten of them during 2020-2022 with the purpose to better understand the (post)pandemic and post-2022 developments in their career. In their recruitment, I was specifically looking for people who had graduated from different urban conservatories in former Soviet republics and who were also affiliated to diverse operatic job placements in Italy or in Europe.

In methodological literatures, people like my informants are viewed as the ‘elite respondents’, one of the most difficult categories of interviewee (Downey et al., 2007; Pinsky, 2015; Plamenov-Petkov & Kaoullas, 2016). Such elite informants can be highly visible for the public, active in social media and, therefore, cautious about their reputations and social statuses. My informants were extremely cautious about any possible disclosure of their identities that might damage their careers and public image. Besides, the operatic circles in Italy were organized as a very close-knit artistic community, where everyone knew everyone and the potential for involuntary disclosure was very high. We can conceptualize this relational landscape as the Statutory Disclosure of a visible informant—a condition when the informant’s status, networking and consequently visibility can easily make him/her recognizable even if his/her name is not mentioned.

I knew, therefore, that I had to be very transparent about my research goals and also very scrupulous about the confidentiality of any information related to my informants. In this book, they are all referred under fictitious names and none of the details of their work, education or living that can identify them in any way is mentioned by me anywhere. None of the people I have interviewed appears in the text under their real name.

Nor am I using any data from private social media or any closed-access social media group. If I make a reference to a famous artist (such as Anna Netrebko, Dmitry Khvorostovskii, Hibla Gerzmava, Nino Machaidze, Maria Mudryak, etc.), this information has been obtained by me from open access sources, which are available to general public.

Artists’ extreme sensitivity to anything related to their status or reputation made my access to the field a challenging—though manageable—task. Plamenov-Petkov and Kaoullas (2016: 412) note that ‘the extent to which an elite respondent cooperates and provides useful information during an interview depends on the researcher’s positionality’. In this connection, a high credit is given to the so-called ‘insider ethnography’, which invests in the ‘insider positionality’ of the researcher (Angotti & Sennott, 2016: 438), expecting him/her to ‘be well-connected prior to the project’ (Plamenov-Petkov & Kaoullas, 2016: 418).

Given this, my positionality as a researcher was Janus-faced: I was both insider and outsider to the ethos of my informants. As an amateur musician myself, I had some access to the opera industry. I personally knew some vocal pianist-coaches and conservatory professors in Italy and Russia, and I had many friends among post-Soviet opera singers. Some of them acted as intermediaries, who knew me very well and could vouch for my ethics. They provided my entry to the field by introducing me to conservatories and individual musicians and thus enabling my snowballing strategy. As an amateur opera singer, I was familiar with operatic repertoire and details of voice production. This circumstance had eventually made all my informants accept my ‘insider identity’ by respecting the fact that they were ‘sharing a common language and culture with the researcher’ (Pinsky, 2015: 287). This factor enabled my ‘ ideal ethnographic point of entry to this “closed” community of practice’ (Downey et al., 2007: 733)—the transnational community of such as high arts musicians.

Related to my insider positionality, my informants were recruited through a variety of ways, namely: channels provided by Italian conservatories and vocal academies, Operabase (2023) and/or private contacts. Initially, all potential informants were extra-cautions before starting to trust me as a researcher and a person. The recruitment process was developing within the rhetoric of what I would like to call the ‘pathfinder ethnography’—that is, a digital communication in which both the researcher and the future informant collect and verify information on each other. Through my social media activities and posts, including those about animal protection rights, pets, favorite movies and TV shows, my political beliefs and everyday cultural attitudes, I wanted my future informants to see what kind of person and professional was. My purpose was to let them see myself as an alive, compassionate and professionally reliable person, who respected their privacy. At the same time, I wanted them to make sure that I was discreet about sensitive information they shared online or about our mutual friends.

Scholars believe that digital platforms and their online spaces may support and enrich offline research activities (Abidin & De Seta, 2020; Zani, 2021). Through the digital communication with my informants, I was not only able to recruit additional interviewees or to interview people online but also to explore and understand their daily routines and socialization patterns, and thus to grasp the general picture of their networking. As argued by Christine Hine (2015) and Beatriz Zani (2021), online and offline spaces of communication are often harmoniously interpolated, enabling researchers like myself to continuously switch between these two modes of ethnographic work and to strengthen the insider positionality.

I was their insider in national terms too because I am originally from Russia. Thus our rapport was indeed supported by my overall insider positionality of co-national and para-professional: they started trusting me because I was able to immediately grasp subtle meanings related to their/our homeland culture and also many banalities of their work such as technical details of voice control. At the same time, I was also an outsider to their networking rules, and this ‘partial outsider positionality’ significantly reduced the risk of overreliance on personal knowledge and became eventually remedied by our continuously increasing rapport and mutual interpretation of their stories, as recommended in interpretive biographic research (Denzin, 1989, 2011, 2014; Isaakyan et al., 2023).

To further increase the rapport, I also invested in the so-called ‘incidental ethnography of sharing some daily experiences’ with my informants through its such activities as staying in their home, meeting with them for meals and encountering them at cultural events (Pinsky, 2015: 281). This ‘flexible approach’ to in-depth interviews (ibid) proved to be reciprocally invigorating both for me as researcher and for them as study participants.

There were, of course, many issues that they found not easy to discuss such as their network dependence, sexual harassment, instability of work, fear of professional oblivion and, of course, their positionality in relation to the post-2022 geopolitical shift. At times, they were also very suspicious and nervous, especially at the very beginning of my fieldwork. I remember Stella saying to me when we had our first chat in Skype:

I don’t really know if I want to talk to you. I have told my story so many times…to all these journalists. And I am extremely disappointed. What they eventually write about me is different what I tell them. Everything has been turned upside down. I do not trust journalists anymore. I don’t need another one.

I had to explain to them many times that I was not a journalist but an academic and that my work ethics would be different. As artists, my informants were, in fact, annoyed with and afraid of journalists, with whom they always have to deal due to the nature of their public work. That was one of the challenges that I had to overcome, breaking through the stereotypes of my informants about researchers and assuring them that their reputation and vulnerability would never be abused. Regardless of how vulnerable they were, they eagerly shared their stories with me eventually. Tearful or smiling, proud or humiliated…they all wanted their voices to be heard and their life experiences to be acknowledged. They all wanted to be ‘made alive’ through my research (Denzin, 2014).

3.2.2 Beyond the ‘Stardom’: The Agency and the Network

‘I hate opera’, says Zosya, ‘I must confess that I loved singing very much when it all started. But now I hate it because it has literally ruined all my life. I haven’t achieved anything of what I wanted. And I cannot understand how it could happen that, wanting more than anything else to be a famous singer, I eventually turned into a mediocre voice teacher and an unknown cabaret musician. What was all this for?’ Indeed, how did it happen that Zosya changed, at some point, her self-perception from an ambitious musician in-the-making, a young transnational star, to a fallen star, who is now a disappointed and under-qualified labor migrant?

At the age of seventeen, Zosya matriculated in her hometown conservatory in Ukraine. It was a modest (not high-rank) conservatory, which she had chosen out of naivety. Not from the music family background, Zosya did not receive any sophisticated advice from her parents or other relatives on how to structure her further music education and professional development. Knowing that she had a nice voice and a talent for music, she was, therefore, sure that she would make her career easily anywhere in the world. The conservatory education ‘proved to be useless’, in terms of providing specific professional skills such as vocal technique and/or valuable contacts in the world of global opera. All her music teachers were very local and unaware how to train and advise ambitious singers with transnational career aspirations. As a result, she started teaching music at a local school in a very small salary upon graduation, while still dreaming about the Netrebko-style Cinderella fairytale and waiting for her opera godparent. The godmother appeared one day right in front of her eyes but in the face of a human trafficker ‘preying on young naïve women and turning them into transnational sexual slaves’, as she herself understand now.

It happened suddenly ‘on a very miserable day when everything seemed so bad’ to Zosya: ‘My miserable salary was not paid in time, and I had nothing to live on at that moment, not even occasional private lessons. On top of that, I had found out that my boyfriend was cheating on me with my best friend’. While sitting in a café ‘over a cup of tasteless coffee’ (because she could not afford anything else) and literally crying over her fainting ‘baby-star’ fate, Zosya encountered her old high school friend, whom she had not seen for seven years. ‘In high school that girl had always had a bad reputation of being promiscuous, smoking pot and having sex with older guys. Although I must admit that she had been always very smart, street-wise’. After Zosya had shared her sad career story over her friend’s paid bunch of delicious cheesecakes, the friend only asked one question, looking into Zosya’s misty eyes and offering her a napkin: “Do you seriously want to move to Europe?” ‘I knew that she was not joking’, says Zosya,’from that instant, I realized that she was meaning it and that she was indeed able to help, although I did not quite understand how exactly she was going to do this. I instantaneously agreed’.

The friend happened to be a “coyote”, a human smuggler, who was dispatching local girls to European countries as undocumented migrants for various kinds of undocumented work including sexual trafficking. ‘She assured me that all I needed was to enter Italy, even as an illegal migrant and to engage in some undocumented but benign work there for a few months until I would find a sponsor for a better job and apply for the permit to stay. She assured me that it was very easy’, says Zosya, ‘Sexual work was just one of the options, which I rejected of course’.

In Italy, Zosya ‘lived in horrible conditions for almost five years, sharing a tiny and dirty room with three other Ukrainian women’. One of them was a undocumented hotel cleaner like herself, and the other two were sex workers, constantly bringing clients home and stealing Zosya’s money and personal belongings. Zosya found it impossible to move to another job and/or to change the status because she was always in a financial debt to her smuggler, the detail that her coyote friend had not discussed priorly. For these miserable five years, Zosya was borrowing the money from her traffickers for basic food and also for private voice lessons because she was still hoping to make a singing career. So the debt was accumulating and the agentic loop around her undocumented migrant’s neck was tightening.

However, one day her life changed dramatically when one her roommate’s client fell in love with Zosya and offered his generous support. He helped her to secure the legal job of a domestic worker for one of his older relatives and started sponsoring her professional training in a vocal academy. However, by the time she had graduated from that academy, she was already thirty-five. All prospective agents were telling her that she was too old for participating in prestigious international competitions, without which should could not qualify for a decent job contract in a good theater. She ended up singing in churches, at local festivities and in a couple of Tier-4 theaters for a very short-term basis, and ‘mostly giving cheap vocal lessons and professional consultations to aspiring singers’. Her tragic and prolonged ‘young star’ phase had thus eventually led to her failure from the operatic sky.

On the contrary, my other informant Eva grew up in a musicians’ dynasty, and her career route seemed predetermined. Having received the best musical education in the elite music school and conservatory in her home republic and coached by best music teachers and pianists, she was highly skilled professionally and well connected socially in the world of transnational music. Already in the conservatory, she participated in prestigious international concourses and worked with a transnational agent, who arranged her further training in one of the best vocal academies in Europe. ‘I have been made by vocal concourses as an opera star’, says Eva, ‘My first prize was actually a key that opened many doors’. Specifically, she participated in a prestigious vocal concourse in Europe and received a prize because she had been well prepared—trained and recommended—by her teacher, who was one of the best musicians and a friend of her relatives. At that concourse, she was noticed by a good theatrical agent, who was also connected to home musicians that her parents knew. When she, consequently, matriculated in a prestigious vocal academy in Italy, she met her future husband, who helped her pave her further way into the global opera industry. ‘We were alike’, she says, ‘both coming from musicians’ families, attending the same vocal academy and working with similar agents. He had actually seen me at that competition and had laid an eye on me. I guess, we were kind of made for each other’.

To be noticed and helped by somebody is indeed important for a musician, as all my informants confirm and as also illuminated by the fairytale rise of the legendary Anna Netrebko. An unknown young lady from the Russian periphery and an un-networked child of non-musician parents, she remained a modest student in the St Petersburgh Conservatory and a parttime cleaner in the Mariinsky Theater in the early 1990s until she was noticed by the famous conductor and soon-to-be a global opera patron Maestro Valeriy Gergiev (KP.RU, 2023). Their life-changing encounter is a famous media story, a global opera legend, about Maestro Gergiev suddenly disturbed and arrested by the singing of the young Netrebko, who was cleaning the floors in their theater (ibid; Mattison, 2005; Woman Hit, 2009). It has been narrated many times in press that Gergiev immediately offered Netrebko a spot in the Mariinsky Vocal Academy, converting her into a giant star within the next couple of years (ibid).

Some opera fans truly believe in this legend while others question its credibility. Nevertheless, an undeniable fact about all these different career stories is the dependence of these ‘young stars’ as both elite professionals and migrants on influential people and life-changing encounters, which teach them insider knowledge and agency-related lessons about global elite migrant networks.

It is these critical points and inflicted life lessons that throw light on their elite careers, migrant agency and transnational networks, and that we, sociologists, should try to understand when looking into their lives and especially when trying to understand how their networks function. Thinking about the agency and networking of my informants and looking into their ‘rising-‘ or ‘falling star’ formation stories, I seek to capture the biographic—or agentic—aspect of their networking trajectories. I look deeply into the fragile and, at the same time, extremely ambitious lives of my informants and into the meanings they themselves assign to their lived experiences of trying to become a global opera star—that is, of being fully included in or, to a certain extent, rejected by the global opera industry. This book captures them making sense of their own transnational lives, elite careers and networks through these life-changing events and their own reflections on them.

As noted by Anna Triandafyllidou in a number of her pioneering works, migrant agency is invariably ‘liquid’ by nature (Triandafyllidou, 2018; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022). This means that, within the overall ‘fluid’ context of societal ‘ambivalence’ (Bauman, 2000; Giddens, 2000), agency of migrants—or their decision-making about migration—is, in fact, polysemantic: it is operationalized in multiple configurations, reflecting the diversity of individual and structural factors (Ahrens & King, 2023). The ‘liquidity’ of migrant agency also means that it is a very dynamic process, during which one and the same migrant can make different decisions about career choices and contacts with people (Triandafyllidou, 2017, 2018; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022).

Another important point is the epistemological bridge between ‘migrant agency’ and ‘migrant network’ (Isaakyan et al., 2023). The ‘agency-network’ nexus implies that the professional network of the migrant is a specific outcome of his/her agency because the network is shaped by the migrant’s ability to explore and to utilize existing social relations (Triandafyllidou, 2018; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022). Therefore, networking in which migrants engage is another ‘fluid’- that is, highly dynamic and multi-faceted—process that encompasses individual characteristics of migrants and structural forces around them including gender, class (often connected to social status and family background) or ethnicity and nationality (ibid). The focus of this book is thus the ‘agency-network’ nexus in its reference to the processual (or changing) and interactional texture of migrant agency, whose main target is network membership and its further management.

As social anthropologists argue, the fluidity—or dynamics—of a particular phenomenon is best understood through the interpretive-biographic lens (Bauman, 2000; Denzin, 1989, 2011; Giddens, 2000; Isaakyan et al., 2023). In resonance with this stance, my work is grounded in the distinct analytical framework of interpretive biographic research, which allows to see how crucial events (known as ‘turning points’) drive the agency of migrants as manifested in their choices and decisions on migration and networking (ibid). Attention to these events and to migrants’ thoughts about consequent life changes fosters a new understanding of forces that shape global migrations. Through the prism of interpretive-biographic research, this book looks at career-and migration- trajectories of sixty opera singers from the former Soviet bloc who now live and work in Italy.

As argued by scholars and also illuminated by the biographies of my informants above, migratory trajectories cannot be always foreseen with precision because so many things may happen to migrants during their migratory journeys (Engbersen, 2018; Ahrens & King, 2023; Isaakyan et al., 2023). While making certain choices and taking action, migrants are often oriented by quite obscure goals, which they further clarify as they move through unfamiliar territories, or ‘navigate’ alien waters beyond their prior habitual spaces, as Triandafyllidou (2018) observes. The clarity of vision may be achieved years later, and with life experience gained from specific encounters that provide agentic clues for this trailblazing (ibid; Ahrens & King, 2023). In this reshaping of migratory objectives and routes, the past and the present inevitably interact in unexpected configurations, which are, however, ruled by existing institutions of power, though not always as envisioned in advance (Denzin, 2011; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022). There are thus so many nuances that may be hidden from the casual gaze and that may need to be understood by scholars who study migrant networks (Ahrens & King, 2023).

3.2.3 The Structure and Wholeness of Lived Experience

In this connection, the interpretive biographic approach, which methodologically prioritizes lived biographic experience, seeks to discover a new profound sense in a little and previously neglected detail (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001, 2017; Denzin, 2011, 2014; Poulos, 2012; Tamas, 2011; Ulmer, 1989). The final outcome of this approach is a novel knowledge achieved through intense collaboration between researcher and interview (Denzin, 2011). The distinction of herein generated knowledge is an in-depth understanding of critical events and consequent epiphanic, or self-revelatory, thoughts that such events stimulate in informants. These turning points and their epiphanies are to throw light on human interaction including social connections such as migrant networking (ibid). This is illuminated by Anna Netrebko’s encounter with Gergiev in the early 1990s and her first global success performance at the Salzburgh Opera Festival in 2002 (Woman Hit, 2009). Zosya’s counter-directional encounter with her high-school friend is another example. Many other migrant stories, shared by either skilled or disadvantaged migrants, point to the power of such life-changing events (Ellis & Triandafyllidou, 2022; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022), which profoundly alter the life perception of economically privileged older migrants moving overseas for their retirement (Benson, 2009; King et al., 2017) or of under-educated pregnant women-migrants in South-European detention hot-spots (Grotti et al., 2019). Lack of attention to such events and to reflections upon them may result in our unawareness of the most difficult hardships experienced by migrants and of most subtle meanings they assign to such encounters, and, consequently, in our overall misinterpretation of reality (Triandafyllidou et al., 2022).

Alongside with turning points and epiphanies, an essential feature of the interpretive biographic method is the creation of a ‘thematic biography’ as a methodological tool to illuminate the dynamics of human relations or a specific phenomenon under study (Creswell, 2013). Thematic biography refers to a particular period of the informants’ life associated with a specific activity. In my case, it is their professional biography, which becomes a methodological tool to explore the work of their migrant agency and networking.

Responding to this, the interpretive biographic method is situated at the crossroads between advanced qualitative methodologies and methodological globalism, which is more and more practiced in the scholarship of migration (ibid). Methodological globalists (Dumitru, 2021; Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Koos & Keulman, 2019; Liu, 2012) value the wholeness of the global world, stressing, for example, that migrants’ networks can be nestled simultaneously in different countries (Ellis & Triandafyllidou, 2022; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022), like interacting galaxies. This is seen in the early career rise of Eva, whose home conservatory was very well networked with European international concourses and their stakeholders.

Apart from that, the school of methodological globalism acknowledges the relative importance of homeland: the country of origin is never forgotten, although the migrant may have already inhabited other spaces of belonging (Chernilo, 2011; Faist, 2012; Koos & Keulman, 2019). Thus Anna Netrebko remains a Russian person and a Russian artist (Mattison, 2005; RT, 2014; Marshall & Hernández, 2023). In fact, she always sings the diverse Russian operatic repertoire in her concerts and has a very strong attachment to the Russian cities of Krasnodar (the place of her birth and upbringing) and St Petersburg (the place of her early star formation) (Opera 2019). She also used to spend a lot of time working and living in Russia prior to 2022, and her first reaction to the post-2022 geopolitics was that of solidarity with Russia as her homeland and its polity (Netrebko, 2022). However, she is not any longer the Russian person she used to be: she has built the second and the third home in Austria and the USA, where she sees the future for her autistic son and for herself as a global opera supergiant. She has, therefore, eventually turned into a dissident-artist living between Vienna and New York (Smirnova, 2022).

On the same note, neither Zosya nor Eva would now like to repatriate despite Zosya’s painful experience of trafficking at destination or Eva’s memory of Georgia as a unique place of her early star formation. Neither of them is a Ukrainian or Georgian woman anymore: they are both post-Soviet diasporic artists living in Italy. Netrebko, Zosya and Eva are all real people, with their own individual stories, positioned both in their countries of origin and abroad. Although resonating with each other to a certain extent (because they are all artists by training), their lived experiences are individual and unique in their pain, joy and life perception. And as a methodological globalist and interpretive biographer, I am keenly interested in capturing this uniqueness and in making sense of its complexities.

Like an interpretive biographer, I would like to uncover ‘a meaningful biographic experience of a real person’ (Denzin, 2011: 205). Specifically for this reason, this book pays a close attention to critical events in a person’s life—or to the ‘turning point interactional episodes through which human lives are shaped and human character is revealed’ (ibid). In sociology, the ‘turning point’ is defined as an event that changes the life of a person forever (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001, 2017; Denzin, 2011, 2014; Poulos, 2012; Tamas, 2011; Ulmer, 1989) and, therefore, ‘leaves a permanent mark’ on his/her self-perception (Denzin, 1989).

Such events can be positive if they enable a person to perceive her/his life as becoming better and more self-fulfilling with new chances (Glaser & Strauss, 1971; Gottlib & Wheaton, 1997; Teruya & Hser, 2010). This is illuminated by Netrebko’s encounter with Gergiev or Eva’s prize at the vocal competition. For my informants, a positive turning point could be associated with an event provoking their progression from a very early career stage (at which the informant had been very naïve and inexperienced in the ways of the world) to a more mature career stage. It could be, for example, an encounter with an influential agent or patron.

There were, however, also negative turning points, which could cause a rupture in their lives and a range of negatively coloured sentiments associated with discomfort, shame or inability to move forward, to make independent decisions and to control the flow of their own life (Elder et al., 1991; Rutter, 1996; Gottlib & Wheaton, 1997). This was experienced by Zosya when she realized how deeply she had been indebted to the smuggling network. The post-2022 geopolitical shift has become one such event for my informants from Russia, who were pressured by their transnational networks to make difficult choices and publicly denounce its polity.Footnote 2

Thinking about such critical events (whether positive or negative), Glaser and Strauss (1971: 92) argue that they inevitably cause an ‘irreversible transformation of perception: once having changed, there is no going back’. The herein conveyed ‘irreversibility of time’ (Ahrens & King, 2023; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022) explains why Netrebko tried to repatriate in February 2022 but failed to stay in Russia shortly afterwards. This explanation has nothing to do with her ‘weakened patriotism’ (as the Russian mass media now try to portray her) but with the fact that she has changed both as an artist (a professional who cannot live and work away from western theaters) and a person (thinking mostly about her son rather than herself). This irreversibility of time also explains why their repatriation was associated with career failure, or ‘fall from the sky’, for my interviewees. The irreversibility of time—or the point of no return—is further seen in how they perceive their relationships with the global opera network and specifically with such its space as black hole (as illuminated later in this book).

Exploring the herein challenged and modified social relations, interpretive biographers further seek to uncover how turning points may ‘radically alter and shape the meanings persons give to themselves and their lives’ (Denzin, 2011). This leads us to the other pivotal category of interpretive biographic analysis—the ‘epiphany’, or the changed person’s ‘mini-theory about self and society’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001: 5). Epiphany is defined by sociologists as an insightful reflection upon inflicted change and upon the emerging new self (ibid). It is ‘a narrative of self-enlightenment’ about the transformation of your own life as person and professional (Triandafyllidou et al., 2022: 22). From this interpretive biographic angle, migrant agency should be understood as ‘an interactive process of exploring social relations, an itinerary with different stops and milestones, where the journey can change its nature and direction and where there can be returns and new departures’ (ibid: 7). It is a process of ‘navigating the new country environment, with an interplay between the migrant’s initial hopes and expectations, actual conditions that s/he is faced with, and ways in which the migrant develops their agency and seeks to turn these conditions in their favour (ibid: 8). Scholars further note that, apart from undergoing a personal life change and generating new decisions under the influence of various critical events, migrants can also significantly modify, through such passages of self-alteration, the existing conditions of their own life and work including their own network membership (ibid; King et al., 2017; Squire, 2017).

3.3 The Power of Sociological Metaphor

3.3.1 Towards Sociological Imagination

A question that sociologists may further ask while reading the testimonies of my informants is how we should think about them as global elite migrants and specifically about their agency and networking through the prism of reflexive, non-conventional sociology, to which this interpretive biographic research belongs. The analytical de-construction of interpretive biographic interviews and consequent re-construction of research findings through discovered turning points and epiphanies must go hand in hand with the sociological imagination about their representation. In this connection, scholars of migration studies have been struggling for years to elaborate a socio-anthropological metaphor that would capture the functioning of migrant agency and networking, comparing these processes with nautical and various other spatial activities such as ‘navigating unknown waters’, ‘maintaining boundaries’ or ‘living in the borderless space’.

As for global elite migrants, their networks are so complex and, at the same time, so interdependent, fluid and invisible that none of the existing metaphors achieves to capture this complexity precisely and to throw light on its dynamics. The networks of global elite migrants are both invisible and omnipresent. In fact, many ordinary people would never even think about the lives of transnational opera singers and the seriousness of their work. However, their work and networks are invariably connected to national and international politics and transnational business. In fact, the majority of totalitarian leaders such as Mussolini, Hitler or Castro had a long-term mistress or a secret flame among the famous opera singers, actresses, ballet dancers and athletes. This is, for example, illuminated by the intimate connections between Stalin and various Soviet opera singers and ballet dancers throughout 1930–1940s, Hitler’s longing for the movie-star Marika Rökk during the same historical period (Orlov, 1991; Karpov, 2000), or the attachment of Fidel Castro and his descendants to the Cuban prima-ballerina Alicia Alonso throughout the whole political reign of the Castro’s dynasty (Schwall, 2021; Tomé, 2021).

From the positive side, athletes have been frequently used as a tool for cultural diplomacy or Olympic Diplomacy, aiming to promote World Peace and to improve international relations (Levermore & Budd, 2004; Rofé, 2018). This is illuminated by Chinese table-tennis players engaging in team work (or team exchanges) with their US counterparts during the Cold War (ibid; Munno, 2022). And more than ever before, global elite migrants, particularly those who are athletes and opera singers, have been recently turned into a powerful tool of the world’s geopolitics (Marshall & Hernández, 2023). This is specifically seen in the case of the opera diva Anna Netrebko, whose transnational mobility and status of the global elite migrant have been seriously threatened by the western hostility against Russia and used as a political tool against its military operation (Smirnova, 2022; Marshall & Hernández, 2023).

On the other side, Anna Netrebko—like many other opera singers of her rank and status—has always participated in advertising campaigns of world leading fashion industries and business corporations such as Swarovsky or Austrian Airlines (Opera Fresh, 2014; Stölzl, 2014). This is further confirmed by the fashion modelling activities of retired figure skating champions such as Alina Zagitova and the collaboration between the Royal Opera House of Muscat in Oman and the Jaguar Corporation, proving again that professional activities of global elite migrants intertwine with various business empires that generously sponsor their professional domains.

In fact, global elite migrants such as transnational opera singers, including my informants, live and work in rather complex and under-studied networks that bring together a variety of actors from both the global music industry and beyond its professional boundaries. Existing sociological concepts and metaphors are not sufficient to capture this specificity, with all global inter-connectivity, geopolitical robustness and, at the same time, extreme fragility of such networks. We can see this relational complexity in the following example. Twenty years ago, maestro Valeriy Gergiev became one of the most influential network actors in the global opera industry, equaling the influential level of the grand Placido Domingo (Culture.RU, 2016). However, in the light of the post-2022 geopolitics, Gergiev has been instantaneously overthrown from his global operatic throne.

Flourishing one day and completely disappearing the next…Such a complex geopolitical and socio-cultural dynamics around global elite migrations needs a novel mode of sociological imagination and representation. ‘Look into the night sky and you will see myriads of stars shining, blinking, fainting, falling down and vanishing from our view. However, all of them are intrinsically interconnected in such a manner that nothing can disappear without a trace because they all live and die in galaxies, which last for millions of years. This is our universe…’ Having occasionally caught these fancy rhetorical lines from one of the Discovery Channel’s educational movies five years ago, I recalled the perennial Russian TV show under the title of ‘Stellar Factory’, an entertaining program showcasing ordinary teenagers trained and transformed into pop stars in front of spectator’s eyes. It suddenly occurred to me that metaphors such as ‘star’, ‘stardom’ and ‘star formation’ had always been used in mass media and everyday talk in reference to the work and career success of artists and athletes, remaining, however, no more than just expressive vocabulary. The above-mentioned astronomy-for-dummies show from the Discovery Channel had triggered my sociological imagination, provoking me to take a closer look at and, consequently, to elaborate the new sociological metaphor of ‘astrogation’ in relation to the subject of my on-going research.

The sociological metaphor, which has been frequently used by non-conventional, post-positivist sociologists in a variety of contexts, is defined by Jonathan Wynn (2016) as ‘an analytical technique where one image stands in place of another’. ‘Think metaphorically!’ has been the persistent message sent by Zygmunt Bauman in many of his works to the new generation of sociologists. Many influential scholars admit that the sociological theorizing is akin to art because its interpretation needs metaphors to persuade the reader (Goffman, 2008; Golovakha, 2012; Kravchenko, 2016). Sociological imagination is indeed impossible without metaphors (Urry, 2007; McKinnon, 2012; Kravchenko, 2016) since the sociologist’s entire work is an incessant process of their creation (ibid; Kanyguin, 1998, 1999, 2002). Metaphor has indeed become an important element of social science, enabling social scientists to make discoveries and to develop informative theories (Kravchenko, 2016).

Although the first attempts of the ‘metaphorization of sociology’ were made as early as at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘metaphorical turn’ in sociology was officially endorsed years later, through the works of the symbolic interactionist and dramaturgical sociologist Erving Goffman, whose comparison between human behavior and ‘theatrical performance’ immediately became one of the most powerful sociological metaphors (Frankenberg, 1986). The other influential advocate of ‘metaphorical reasoning’ is Zygmunt Bauman (Jacobsen & Marshman, 2012: 307), ‘a metaphorical thinker who deploys metaphors to highlight fundamental aspects of the social world’ (ibid: 308). As a consequence of their legacy, metaphors are now present on all levels of sociological research (Kravchenko, 2016). This can be illuminated by such famous examples of sociological metaphor as: ‘human society’ compared to ‘web of patterned interactions’ (by Georg Simmel), ‘contract’ (by Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and ‘organic body’ (Herbert Spencer); ‘city’ by metaphorically viewed by Robert Park and Ernest Burgess as ‘ecology’; or ‘self’ referred to as a ‘mask’ and ‘mirror’ by Erving Goffman and Charles Cooley respectively. As noted by Wynn (2016), the whole analytical framework through which Erving Goffman studies human behaviors and interactions is actually comprised of metaphors such as ‘backstage’, ‘frontstage’, ‘stigma’ and ‘framing’).

Especially inspirational are the metaphors that sociologists develop when borrowing conceptual devices from natural sciences. Already at the beginning of the twentieth century, social scientists started to notice the parallelism between the social and the natural worlds, including their similarity and transfer of meanings (Bogdanov, 1922; Kravchenko, 2016). The consequent ‘influence of natural symbols’ on studies of social organization (Douglas, 1973) and robustness of the ‘increasing currency spatial metaphors of space, field and boundary in different styles of contemporary sociological theorizing’ (Silber, 1995) are not surprising, given that sociology views each research subject ‘in its harmony with coexisting natural phenomena’ (Levine, 1995). Thus a powerful ‘source of inspiration for sociological analysis’ has been offered by natural sciences (Silber, 1995), such as astronomy, on the basis of which I elaborate the “astrogation” metaphor in this book. Silber (1995) further notes that, when applied to sociological analysis, such metaphors (which are grounded in natural sciences) invariably strengthen the post-positivistic, or novel, approach to social reality that all interpretive biographers advocate.

Advocating the power of sociological metaphorization, proponents of this analytical technique see it as inseparable from true sociological imagination. As noted by Jacobsen and Marshman (2012: 312), the sociological imagination should aim ‘to intensify our ability to penetrate the actual working of the world and to capture its diversity’. And as priorly explained by Wright Mills (1959), to capture the diversity and complexity of the social world—or ‘to study human variety’- actually means to be able ‘to relate seemingly incompatible elements’, or to see the inter-connectivity between very different phenomena. However, ‘to make sense of complex social phenomena’ is an extremely difficult task, the successful completion of which is often enabled by sociological metaphors (McKinnon, 2012).

This is true that metaphors enable sociologists to better ‘reflect on and capture human variety’—that is, to understand the complexity of our social world by ‘both clarifying and reducing’ (Wright Mills, 1959) because ‘at the heart of the “metaphor” concept lies the translation between unequal things’ (McKinnon, 2012). And when we study to what extent these entirely different things can be similar, we actually look deeply into ‘the dialectical relationships between various activities surrounding the social phenomenon’ and also discover new relations between them (Frankenberg, 1986). In this sense, Friedrich Nietzsche (1996[1887]: 5) views metaphor not only as a key to the understanding of a social organization but as ‘the basis of [the new] social order itself’.

To be more specific, it is the metaphor that can allow the sociologist to see the world in an entirely new, ‘unfamiliar light’, which has never been noticed before (Wright Mills, 1959)—that is, to discover these “hidden” and “invisible” nuances that interpretive sociologists seek to find and illuminate, ‘to say a lot about a little thing’ (Denzin, 2011; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022). It is not, therefore, surprising that metaphorization has been the ‘favorite sociological strategy’ of Zygmunt Bauman (2000), who has been also an ardent proponent of interpretive biographic research, stressing the importance of bringing these two sociological approaches together, in resonance with many other scholars (Campbell, 1991, 2008[1949]; Denzin, 1989, 2011; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022). Together with interpretive biographic epiphanies, sociological metaphors can create a new meaning ‘to account for the familiar and well-known’ (Jacobsen & Marshman, 2012: 312). As further pinpointed by Jacobsen and Marshman (ibid), this feature of the sociological metaphor is illuminated by Bauman’s famous metaphor of ‘vagabond’ in relation to impoverished people, which enables us to see poverty in its relation to and dependance from mobility. In this sense, sociological metaphors are should be given credit for their ‘moral’ value because shape critical thinking by awakening our sentiments about the way certain groups of people are treated in a by society (ibid: 317).

3.3.2 Migrant Agency, or Astrogation

In line with these scholarly developments, I use, in this book, the sociological metaphor of ‘astrogation’ to illuminate the complexity of global elite migrations and related migrant networks, and also to awaken a more critical and more ethical thinking about my informants as a social group of “elite professionals” who may be both glamorous and fragile, lucky and disadvantaged, who can rise to unimaginable heights in their migratory and professional careers and, at the same time, unexpectedly fall down—rather than de facto viewed as “privileged people” who have no problems and, therefore, do not deserve scholarly attention.

And since the metaphorical approach is considered a “non-conventional sociological strategy”, I would like to explain some of its technicalities. Scholars note that sociological metaphors can be created either ‘during the creative state of the research process or during the stage of writing up the results’ (Swedberg, 2020: 250). Following their advice, I did not use metaphors at the very beginning of my fieldwork and initial analysis to avoid an artificial interpretation of findings (Bachelard, 2002; Swedberg, 2020). The ‘astrogation’ metaphor was introduced into my work only in 2019, when the major part of my data had been collected and analyzed and when had I started to notice some similarities between my informants’ stories and testimonies, on the one hand, and the astronomy discourse and the astrogation phenomenon, on the other hand. Those similarities were not only found in the words of my informants, who were persistently comparing themselves with different kinds of ‘star’, but primarily in the logistics of their work and lives and that of cosmic astrogation processes (as I further illuminate in this book).

Swedberg (2020: 244) further notes that, ‘as the interpretive sociological analysis unfolds, metaphors can play an important heuristic role by suggesting various hypotheses and ideas, which have their origin in a metaphor and should be tested’. For example, in the middle of my concurrent fieldwork and analysis, I started to notice some similarities between narrated network sanctions that had been imposed upon my informants and their inability to sustain network pressure, on the one hand, and the cosmic formation of black hole spaces, on the other hand. Astrophysicists explain very vividly why destructive black holes that exist in our universe are impossible to detect and avoid, given their composition and consequent textual invisibility as well as strong gravitational forces that do not leave a slimmest chance for approaching objects to escape. I started to ask myself what if something similar was happening in my informants’ networks. This line of thinking provoked me to look more deeply into the networking relations that might have entrapped my informants and also to pay a closer attention to their possible agentic unawareness and unpreparedness to deal with such relational spaces.

As also argued by Swedberg (2020: 245), to sustain its high sociological value, ‘the metaphor should be carefully worked out and generalized to other situations’ beyond a specific project. In this connection, scholars note the power of the ‘metaphorical cornucopia’ (Jacobsen & Marshman, 2012: 321), referring to a well-designed ‘metaphoric network, in which one metaphor, in effect, calls for another and each one stays alive by conserving its power to evoke the whole network of metaphors and creating the root metaphor’ (Ricoeur, 1984: 16). It is within this epistemological framework that my root metaphor of ‘astrogation’ is elaborated, offering a whole metaphorical network with such mid-range metaphors as ‘star formation’, ‘black hole’, ‘white hole’, and ‘star life cycle’. These heuristic devices are borrowed from the field of astrophysics, as I will further explain in the next chapters. And as I argue in this book, the root metaphor of ‘astrogation’ can be applied not only to this particular case of transnational opera singers from the former Soviet bloc but also to other global elite migrant groups such as athletes, for example. They are all inventive astronauts who astrogate, throughout their career progression, the unknown and often dangerous galaxies of humans relations and professional networks. And they are also stars, who undergo a specific life cycle in their elite professional growth throughout their global migrations.

The application of this metaphorical framework is situated within the traditional rhetoric of migration scholarship. Recognizing the ‘fluid’ nature of global migrations in general and of migrant agency and networking in particular (Engbersen, 2018; Isaakyan, 2022; Triandafyllidou et al., 2022), scholars of migration continuously expand the use of spatial metaphors in social sciences and search for ‘nautical’ and ‘isomorphic’ metaphors to capture the meaning of migrant agency and network. For example, migrants can be approached through the prism of ‘navigation’ or ‘sailing along the migrant archipelago’ (Triandafyllidou, 2018). Within these lines, the networking and agency of global elite migrants can be further compared with a spacecraft navigation and inter-galactic journey that elite migrants make in hope of becoming global stars.

Basically speaking, migrating elite professionals such as top athletes, actors and opera singers look for places that would improve their professionalism and raise it up to the global elite level (Hartley, 2021; Kohe et al., 2021). They thus search for places that may have resources sufficient enough for turning them into stars (Hartley, 2021). These places and their networks can be compared with what astronomers call ‘stellar nurseries’ (Paul, 1993; Hawking & Penrose, 1996; Dickinson, 2004; Smith, 2004). And while searching for such stellar nurseries, global elite professionals want to reach them as soon as possible and in the least damaging way, that is, without feeling trapped in an unwanted long-term bond or in a difficult network obligation. In this reference, scholars who study agency and networking across disciplines signal the existence of such traps that can make career progression rather difficult for a skilled migrant (Besnier et al., 2017; Giddens, 2000; Hartley, 2021; Sandoz, 2019; Saxenian, 2006). These traps can be metaphorically understood as what astronomers view as ‘black holes’ (DeWitt & DeWitt, 1973; Thorne, 1994; Melia, 2003a, b; Schutz, 2003; Wheeler, 2007; Mo et al., 2010).

Global elite migrants seek places where they could receive appropriate elite-level education and training, establish themselves as high-rank professionals and then leave whenever they decide to move on with their career (Bale & Maguire, 1994; Hartley, 2021; Book et al., 2020; Smismans et al., 2021). They know that such transnational zones of freedom of movement [or ‘white holes’ (Prialnik, 2000)] are extremely difficult to enter and also to find, while more visible and accessible networks can catch them into a relational loop, or a black hole. They also know that investing in elite places of education (stellar nurseries) and employment (white holes) is time-consuming and unpredictable (Gaudin et al., 2016; Petersen, 2017). That is why, the dream of every global elite migrant such as international artist or athlete is to find a shortcut to an elite democratic place—the professional dream that lies at the core of their network-building (Agergaard et al., 2014; Stambulova & Ryba, 2020), or a ‘wormhole to a desired galaxy such as white hole’ (Visser, 1996; Waller & Hodge, 2003).

As a sociological metaphor, ‘astrogation’ presupposes attention to the ‘agency-network’ nexus: in fact, the concept of ‘astrogation’ does not imply a spontaneous or vaguely planned relocation to ‘anywhere but here’. As an agentic category, astrogation means a focused and purposeful exploration of unfamiliar yet very specific galaxies and their spatial interconnectivity. From this angle, the migrant agency of Zosya and other informants resembles a spaceship that is making a inter-celestial journey through various galaxies with the purpose to find the right space for professional growth and maturity, the right stellar nursery and possible the desired white hole. ‘Tell the world about my existence!’, said Zosya, ‘I want them to know that I have been an ambitious artist and a hard-working migrant. Let them know how much I have tried to be a success’. Like my other informants, she wanted to share her life story, the story of a global elite migrant and an ambitious astronaut. It is a provocative story about the difficult art of astrogation and a search for ‘right’ galaxies, the story about agency and networking.