1.1 They Are Here and Now

An undocumented female immigrant in New York has no medical insurance to allow the doctor to visit, shares a shabby apartment with a few other marginalised immigrants, has very limited money for groceries, and jumps between various gig jobs. An iconic case of seemingly failed labour market integration, this woman somehow manages to survive through the support from her migrant solidarity network. A local ethnic shop owner gives her free groceries, while an immigrant taxi driver offers her free rides from job to job. Out of the blue, a stranger hires her for a one-night job in an underground casino, without, however, clarifying her prospective duties. This is how Luciana, the protagonist in the movie Most Beautiful Island, engages in a high-risk informal market game of touching venomous insects to entertain rich clients. The final scene shows Luciana as the winner and sole game survivor, who leaves catatonically but with a tangible cash boon in her purse. The parting smile she then gives us is, nevertheless, telling in that she is determined to come back to play again. In fact, this gaming experience has changed her life forever. She has eventually found a way to earn a lot of money in a short time and resolve all her economic problems while also having proved her skill for this difficult job. Although this is achieved via the informal market and dehumanisation, she has actually arrived at a particular mode of labour market integration.

Luciana’s experience resonates with real-life stories of many migrants around the world and shows that the course of labour market integration may not always run smooth. It can have unexpected twists and be affected by various individual encounters. For Luciana, the casino job was a painful experience of high risk and dehumanisation. At the same time, successfully accomplishing a difficult gaming task opened the door to positive changes in her bifurcating life. While existing policies and laws continuously impede immigrants’ access to the job market, individual encounters may create opportunities for their integration – although sometimes in liminal ways.

It is within this context of everyday uncertainty, institutional bureaucracy, and overall political ambivalence that we seek to capture the interpretive-biographic, or agentic, aspect of labour-market integration. We want to look deeply into vulnerable and, at the same time, empowering lives of migrants and into the meanings they assign to their lived experience of (not) being integrated in their host societies labour markets. Our book captures them making sense of their own lives and of ‘being alive’ to this new world Here and Now, in this NowHereLand that is meant to become their home. To be more precise, we aim to understand how specific, often unnoticed, events may change migrants’ lives and attitudes to labour-market integration.

There have been many studies on various forms, or proxies, of labour-market integration (Bal, 2014; Berntsen, 2016; De Beer & Schills, 2009a). Among scholars and policymakers, there is consensus on the economically integrated migrant as a well-paid professional who works in the area of their specialisation and rapidly progresses in their career (Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019). A significantly under-studied element is what is actually happening en route and how it may be understood by the migrants themselves. It is not clear how migrating people navigate the context around their labour-market integration and reflect upon their own experiences.

In this connection, we ask: what events change the trajectories and self-positioning of migrants? What consequences do these events have for migrants’ labour-market integration? How do migrants work out or adapt to such changes? What are their reflections on these changes?

It is important to remember that integration is ‘liquid’ by nature. In the ‘fluid’ milieu of the overall societal ‘ambivalence’ (Bauman, 2000; Giddens, 2000), labour market integration is, in fact, expected to have a variety of patterns and individual characteristics, the complexity of which cannot always be captured through traditional methods. This ‘liquidity’ means that labour-market integration is a very dynamic process with temporal characteristics.

Another important point is that while integration is a specific outcome of migrant agency, or ‘navigation of social relations’ by the migrant, it is also a dynamic, multi-dimensional process bringing together an interplay of individual characteristics and structural forces such as gender, class, and ethnicity (Triandafyllidou, 2018). Our main starting point is, therefore, the ‘integration-agency’ nexus which implicates the processual and interactive nature of migrant agency in its work toward achieving labour market integration.

As further noted by social anthropologists, a particular phenomenon’s processual character, or fluidity, is best understood through the interpretive-biographic lens (Bauman, 2000; Denzin, 1989; Denzin & Lincoln, 2001; Denzin, 2011; Giddens, 2000). That is why we use the concepts of ‘integration’, ‘agency’, and ‘interpretive biography’ (or ‘biographical journey’) as the main heuristic devices to investigate the dynamics of labour market integration. Our work is grounded in a very distinct and novel analytical framework that uses a combination of theoretical and methodological concepts. This framework allows us to explore how specific crucial events (‘turning points’) affect the work of migrants’ agency (embedded in their decision-making passages of identity crisis, or ‘epiphanic passages’) and leads toward a new understanding of their own integration (reflected in their ‘epiphanies’).

Through the prism of interpretive-biographic research, our book looks at migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees who have arrived from 2014 to 2019 in six European countries (notably the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Switzerland, the UK) and Canada – all countries that have experienced significant recent (post-2014) flows but which have very different immigration experiences and backgrounds. The book investigates the initial labour market integration experiences of these migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers who are characterised by different biographies and migration/asylum trajectories, through an inter-subjective lens. The adopted interpretive-biographic approach enables us to trace and better understand how migrants develop their aspirations and capability to move, what resources they mobilise, and how these elements condition their progression toward the moving target of the host country labour market.

Our work gives voice to the migrants themselves and seeks to highlight their own experiences and understandings of the labour market integration process in the first years of immigration. Each chapter brings migrants’ intersubjective experiences into dialogue with relevant policies and practices – as well as with relevant stakeholders, whether local government, national services, civil society, or migrant organisations.

1.2 The Notion of Labour Market Integration

Various studies show that for the migrant, success of labour market integration is generally associated with employment in decent working conditions (Bal, 2014; Berntsen, 2016; De Beer & Schills, 2009a). The parameters of decent work and, consequently, of labour market integration include: adequate/qualified employment (v. under-qualification), adequate payment (v. underpayment), social mobility [e.g.: professional development, career promotion, skill acquisition] (v. social immobility), social protection against injustice on the workplace (v. abuse of human rights), social benefits [e.g.: health benefits, childcare, retirement benefits], and equal treatment or equality of opportunity compared to other workers who are both local and foreign (Anxo et al., 2010; Berntsen, 2016; Gallie, 2007a, b, c). The equality of opportunity on the workplace is actually the main principle of labour market integration, which underpins the other aspects of decent work (Gallie, 2007a, b, c; ILO, 2022).

In this connection, labour market integration is de facto tailored to the notion of formal and legally protected employment, or state-protected employment in the formal labour market (De Beer & Schills, 2009a, b; Eichhorst et al., 2009). It is mostly within the formal-job-market context that member state laws and regulations have the power to protect the third-country national who is looking for and/or taking a job (ibid; Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019).

Although labour market integration resonates with economic integration, these two concepts are not exactly the same. The spatiality of economic integration, which is mostly associated with income and payment, is actually wider than labour market integration, which is associated with formal, decent and state-protected work (Berntsen, 2016; De Beer & Schills, 2009a). In fact, foreign nationals may be well off or just living not badly on a steady income even outside the space of formal employment (Calamai, 2009; Isaakyan, 2015). For example, a foreign national in Europe can be a retired American woman living well on her US pension (ibid; King et al., 2017) or a relatively well-set domestic worker employed in the informal market (Calamai, 2009; Marchetti, 2014a, b).

The informal market may indeed offer a variety of employment opportunities to third-country nationals, although with a varied degree of human rights- and employment rights- protection (Isaakyan, 2015). It is the extreme instability of decent work as a pre-requisite of labour market integration that makes the sphere of informal work a very fragile space of labour market integration (Anxo et al., 2010; Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019; Calamai, 2009; Costa-I-Font, 2010). Scholars often view informal job as a very marginal segment of labour market integration (Anxo et al., 2010; Marchetti, 2014a, b), which sometimes allows the migrant to somehow stay in the country and accumulate some money before establishing oneself as a decent professional in the formal job market (ibid; Isaakyan, 2022). While the degree of quality of life and human rights protection fluctuates significantly from case to case (ibid). Some migrants, who work in the informal job market continuously complain on the abuse of their basic human rights by the employer (Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019; Costa-I-Font, 2010; Marchetti, 2014a, b), while others may seem quite satisfied with their economic and overall living conditions (Isaakyan, 2015). In any case, these two spaces of labour market integration are interconnected as often embedded in common networks (Isaakyan, 2022). And the road toward the formal decent work in a foreign country is often paved through the informal market (Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019; Isaakyan, 2015, 2022). That is why, its thin ice keeps enticing ambitious migrants like Luciana and many others, who search for a better life and a more decent job overseas.

1.3 Migrant Agency

Studies further show that a successful case of the migrant’s decent work – which is based on legal protection, equality of opportunity, qualified employment and adequate payment – is an outcome of their agency because prolific conditions of employment at destination are usually achieved by migrants through difficult decisions and various hardships rather than given to them gratis (Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019; Bal, 2014; Berntsen, 2016). Migrants’ integration should be understood as an outcome of their agency.

In this connection, migrants’ agency can be understood as their decision-making about relocation and settlement (Squire, 2017), which is an interactive process of exploring social relations while ‘navigating’ toward or away from integration (Triandafyllidou, 2018). The multi-dimensional (social, spatial, and temporal) nature of migrants’ agency becomes especially apparent in their navigation toward labour market integration, which often develops in non-linear ways (Katz, 2004; Triandafyllidou, 2018). Triandafyllidou (2018) argues that it is a ‘fragmented’ itinerary with different ‘stops and intermediate milestones’, where the journey can change its nature and direction and where there can be returns and new departures. Searching for work, migrants navigate complex administrative requirements, adapt to a new cultural context, and identify job opportunities through formal or informal channels (ibid.).

During these phases of navigating the new country environment, there is 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 (Triandafyllidou, 2017, 2018). This process also involves an intense interaction between individual migrants, their families, and various structural and relational forces that shape migrants’ trajectories and perceptions of integration (Carling & Schewel, 2017; Van Hear et al., 2017).

The interactive nature of migrant agency resonates with the fundamental argument of Anthony Giddens (2000) about the ‘agency-structure’ nexus, which implies a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the environment. Migration scholars note that migrants not only develop new personality traits and make new decisions under the impact of various circumstances of their migration but also create new opportunities for themselves through these dynamics (King et al., 2017; Squire, 2017; Triandafyllidou, 2018).

It is through the interpretive biographical approach, with its specific emphasis on epiphanic moments and passages, that an in-depth understanding of the interaction between individual agency of migrants and wider contexts of their labour market integration can be achieved.

1.4 Interpretive-Biographic Framework: Agency Under the Microscope

1.4.1 Biographic Milestones of Agency

The interpretive-biographic method that informs the case studies presented in this book allows for a deeper insight into the details and dynamics of migrants’ decision-making on their own integration. This method allows us to see labour market integration as a highly reflexive and interactive process.

In our work, we ally the theoretical resources of ‘agency’ and ‘integration’ (borrowed from Migration Studies) with the methodological resources of ‘interpretive biography’ (borrowed from existing biographical methodologies). This new framework brings together the concepts of ‘migrant agency’ and ‘migrant reflexive biography as an integration journey’.

In epistemological terms, we do not only look into particular episodes that are known in biographical research as ‘turning points’. We explore the nexus between the critical event, the identity crisis it causes, and the epiphanic moment at which the person finalises their biographical journey. We delve into the epiphanic triangle connecting the turning point, the crisis passage, and the epiphany alongside the life course of the migrant. In other words, the migrant’s labour market integration goes through several such turning points or ‘epiphanic passages’.

Below we elaborate in more detail on the interpretive-biographic framework in general and on its applications to studies of integration in particular.

Migrant integration research that adopts a biographic methodological approach needs to acknowledge the notion of ‘liquid times’ as analysed by Zygmunt Bauman (2000). Bauman sees the era of late modernity (or post-modernity) as extremely liquid or fluid. He observes that the post-modern life is full of phenomena that have unpredictable, flexible, and ambivalent forms (ibid.). Along these lines, Engbersen (2018) conceptualises migration as ‘liquid’, or consisting of various intersecting forms and streams. It is within this overall framework of ‘fluidity’ that scholars advocate the biographic approach, which enables them to study dynamics of ‘liquid’ – or polymorphic and changing – phenomena (such as integration) as well as nuances of an interactional process (such as migrant agency) (Creswell, 2013; Denzin, 2011). The biographic approach allows to explore in-depth the relationship between the individual and the social, which plays out if the person experiences life-changing events and new lifestyles and reflects upon them (ibid.).

The biographic methodology investigates events, lifestyle changes, and reflections that challenge and disrupt the notion of the life-course (ibid.; Glaser & Strauss, 1971).Footnote 1 They may give new meanings to institutional norms and other standardised events (ibid.). The biographic method shows how the person has reached their mode of living and self-positioning and what this experience means to them (Creswell, 2013). It shows the ‘meaning of being alive’ (Campbell, 1991: 6). This experience of ‘being alive’ may shape either in resonance or in dissonance with the social dictates of the societal norm (ibid.; Glaser & Strauss, 1971). However, this is exactly the unique experience of ‘being alive’, of living your own life the way it is and of dealing with all its challenges (Campbell, 1991: 6).

In fact, lives in emigration are never fully predictable (Engbersen, 2018). What actually happens to migrants is that in their decision-making they navigate through unknown waters and often toward unclear goals (Triandafyllidou, 2018). The clarification may appear en route and become dependent on specific, unique encounters that act as the signposts of this navigation (ibid.). In this clarification of trajectories and goals, the past interweaves with the present in unpredictable combinations which are, nevertheless, socially structured although in unanticipated ways (Denzin, 2011).

1.5 Interpretive Biography: An Unfinished Breakthrough

When we speak about the biographic approach, it is important to remember that it embraces three distinct methodologies: biographic method, narrative-biographic inquiry, and interpretive biography. While having much in common and definitely intersecting in their logistics, they are not, however, entirely synonymous. The biographic method is a more generic approach to qualitative data that collects and analyses people’s life stories narrated by themselves in the written or oral form (Czarniawska, 2004; Creswell, 2013; Denzin, 1989).Footnote 2 All scholars agree that the basic feature of biographic analysis is its focus on life-changing events known as ‘turning points’ (Coffey, 2018; Denzin, 1989, 2014; Denzin & Lincoln, 2017), across which biographic data should be grouped thematically (Creswell, 2013).

In terms of data analysis and presentation, biographic writing is subdivided into autobiography, narrative biography, and interpretive biography (Denzin, 1989, 2011). In this reference, it is important to remember that interpretive biography is a distinct method that differs from both narrative biography and autobiography. Autobiography is a person’s life story narrated (analysed and presented) by the person themself (ibid.; Merrill, 2019; Merrill & Altheit, 2004; Merrill & West, 2009). The outcome of the autobiographic analysis is how the person/narrator sees their own life (ibid.). Narrative biography, or narrative-biographic inquiry, is a collection and analysis of someone else’s life story by the researcher, who gives it their own scientific interpretation (Kohler-Riessman, 1993). While the method of interpretive biography (interpretive-biographic inquiry) is a collaborative analysis of the informant’s life-story by the researcher (who takes the analytical and interpretive lead) and the informant (who clarifies, adds, and reflects more in-depth under the researcher’s guidance) (Denzin, 1989, 2011; Denzin & Lincoln, 2001, 2017).

Its focus is creation of a life story that would be interpreted together by the narrator and the researcher within the framework of ‘duo-ethnography’ (Denzin, 2011).Footnote 3 The principle of ‘collaborative writing and interpretation’ is based on their constant interaction and rapport (ibid.). The main feature of this approach is that the interpretive biographer does not merely collect meanings (informants’ perceptions) but challenges them together with the informant. This feature of interpretive biography becomes especially meaningful in Migration Studies, which frequently deals with sensitive issues such as undocumented migrants, illegal status, sexual abuse, or domestic violence in a foreign country.

The interpretive biographic method, with its focus on reflexivity about a meaningful biographic experience, can be understood as seeking to say a lot about a tiny, almost invisible thing (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001, 2017; Denzin, 2011, 2014; Poulos, 2012; Tamas, 2011; Ulmer, 1989). Its message is an unexpected story developed by both informant and researcher – a story grounded in a more creative approach to turning points (Denzin, 2011). The main feature of such a story is analysis of epiphanies and all complex relations they convey. This method implies that people whose lives the researcher studies invariably interact with each other, and that this interaction should be symbolically reflected in their turning points and epiphanies (ibid.). Migration scholarship, in fact, brings forward many painful experiences of vulnerable migrants, who may be ageing abroad (Benson, 2009; King et al., 2017) or giving birth during their detention in hotspots or in other cross-border spaces (Grotti et al., 2019). However, the interactional dynamics around such painful experiences is not shown to the fullest. As a result, the most provocative meanings that migrants may find in their own lived experiences may be left buried deep inside their minds and souls, remaining, therefore, invisible to the researcher.

Although the biographical method was in use already in the twentieth century, interpretive biography was initiated by Denzin only in 1989. Since then, biographic studies have been marked by more reflexivity and attention to informants’ symbolic statements and epiphanic theories about the meaning of life (Clifford & Markus, 1986; Conquergood, 1981; Geertz, 1988; Van Maanen, 2011). As a solid paradigm, the interpretive biographic method, however, remained under-developed for a long time and still needs further elaboration as well as new substantive theories to be illuminated by new empirical cases.

Responding to this problem area, our book goes farther than just telling migrants’ stories of relocation. Our aim is to illuminate the lived and self-reflexive experiences of labour market integration and also enrich the epistemological framework around the interpretive biographic method.

1.6 A Tribute to ‘Global Methodologies’

The elaborated here interpretive biographic method belongs not only to advanced qualitative methodologies in the general sense. In its application to Migration Studies, the interpretive biographic method belongs to the new epistemological direction in the scholarship on migration, international relations and global studies, which is known as ‘Methodological Globalism’. As part of the ‘global methodological’ epistemology, the interpretive biographic method is meant to uncover nuances and new spaces of people’s lives and to challenge the previously traditional ‘methodological nationalism’. We can ask here what makes the interpretive biographic method one of the best angles to approach integration. The answer lies in the resonance that the rhetoric of integration has with the rationale of methodological globalism.

Methodological globalists recognize interconnectivity and interdependence within the global community, including transnational networks between people living in different countries, the networks and relations by which the migrant can benefit, while not being restricted by the laws and traditions of his/her country of origin (Dumitru, 2021; Glick Schiller & Salazar, 2013; Koos & Keulman, 2019; Liu, 2012). In this connection, methodological globalism stresses the ‘relativity of national sovereignty’, meaning that homeland still matters for and influences the migrant but not entirely (Cherilo, 2011; Faist, 2012; Koos & Keulman, 2019). Thus Luciana is still a woman from Latin America, but she is now different from that kind of woman that she used to be: she is now a Latina woman who lives in New York – she is a New Yorker with the Hispanic heritage who now knows how to pave her way toward the host labour market.

The relativity of the homeland impact is what is primarily stressed by methodological globalists (Faist, 2012; Koos & Keulman, 2019; Liu, 2012) – the relative impact of national events such as national trauma and war upon the migrant’s life (which we further illuminated by individually experienced turning points). What is emphasized by methodological globalists as supremacy is the ‘universal values’, shared by all members of the herein shaping new community (Koos & Keulman, 2019), to which Luciana now belongs – the values of persevering, believing in a better future and supporting fellow migrants. An illuminative detail is that, why competing with other migrant women for the prize and emerging through the extreme game contest, Luciana nevertheless comes to the rescue of her female competitor. Witnessing her competitor’s fear and shivering, Luciana actually volunteers to take an additional task of dealing with a venomous spider, thus putting her own life at risk but saving the other migrant-woman. This is not anymore a banal survival by any means: for the new Luciana, this act of global solidarity becomes an act of global communalism, which characterizes her a becoming member of a new female migrant community, which is entirely different from the her pre-emigration community of abused women in her country of origin. While preserving Luciana’s national memory as part of new identity, the methodological globalism approach to her case thus stresses what Liu (2012: 9) notes as the ‘governance function of non-state actors’. Their list includes the informal market criminal networks that seemingly trap Luciana but also her new and expanding network of transnational female solidarity that bridges the casino network with that of the sanctuary New York City.

The transnational reciprocity in values and responses, the migrant’s ability for change while also in coupe with self-preservation, the pivotal role of and investment in universal values, and the role of various alterative actors – all these factors of the migrant’s personal growth make the main features in the portrait of his/her integration in general and in the labour market in particular (Baglioni & Isaakyan, 2019; Penninx, 2018). They are the key parameters of integration, and their investigation in reference to labour market and through the interpretive biographic lens is an important contribution to the school of methodological globalism, which extends beyond the boundaries of the traditional methodological nationalism.Footnote 4

1.7 Turning Points: The Lighthouses of Migrant Agency

Like any biographical method, interpretive biography seeks to bring forward to the audience ‘a meaningful biographic experience’ of a real person (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001, 2017; Denzin, 2011, Denzin & Lincoln, 2017; Pelias, 2011; Poulos, 2012; Tamas, 2011; Ulmer, 1989). In this connection, Denzin (2011) notes that it is specifically through ‘turning point interactional episodes’ that ‘human lives are shaped and human character is revealed’. That is why attention to turning points – or critical events – has been the rule of thumb for many years in biographic research that is used in social sciences, especially in sociology and social anthropology. And thinking specifically about such cases as ours, Denzin views turning points as the ‘signposts for migrant agency and integration’ (ibid.: 205).

A ‘turning point’ is an event that causes a significant change in the identity of a person (American Heritage Dictionary, 2022)Footnote 5 and ‘leaves a permanent mark’ on their personality (Denzin, 1989). It is ‘a life event that leads to changes in a life trajectory’ (Teruya & Hser, 2010: 3). Its capacity to change the life of a person is what makes the turning point distinct from an historical or social event in general (Ronka et al., 2003). An interesting fact is that, in line with the widely criticized methodological nationalism, the majority of discourses on the current ‘refugee crisis’ still continuously present refugees as migrants who should experience war in the same way, thus assuming that such historical events as war or military conflict must affect the lives of all people in the same way (Bontenbal & Lillie, 2019).

On the contrary, interpretive biographers agree with methodological globalists on the attitudinal relativity of national event and argue (which we will show in our book) that the same events can be perceived and reflected upon by different migrants differently. The context that forms their agency will thus also differ. And given the underestimation by scholars of diversity of turning points, we would like now to briefly discuss their typology.

The scholarly literature has developed a complex typology of turning points depending on the direction of their impact (positive or negative); the root of the turning point (institutional or personal); the time of the impact (abrupt or incremental); and the strength of the impact (major or minor).

Perhaps the most important distinction is between positive (generative) and negative (withdrawing) turning points. Positive turning points are those that cause positive changes in a person’s life and lead to generative thinking and positive self-perception (Teruya & Hser, 2010; Gottlib & Wheaton, 1997). They foster people to generate new ideas and engage in new self-invigorating practices that open up future opportunities (ibid.; Glaser & Strauss, 1971). Negative turning points may disrupt a comfortable way of living, cause chaos in a person’s life, block agency, and make the deadlock effect of shutting down opportunities (Elder et al., 1991; Rutter, 1996; Gottlib & Wheaton, 1997). Such events can provoke the whole range of ‘withdrawing’ or ‘backsliding’ or behaviours and attitudes such as ‘misalignment, chagrin, anxiety and tension’ (Glaser & Strauss, 1971: 96). They make the ‘shattering’ and traumatic impact upon the person who experiences them, especially if the turning point is associated with betrayal and limited control or limited choice or both (ibid.). All these behaviours have been observed among migrants (Grotti et al., 2019; Marchetti, 2014a, b; Merrill, 2019).

Second, we can summarise turning points as divided into institutional and personified. The former embrace events that often happen on the macro- and meso- levels as part of wider institutional or national frameworks. They are related to the functioning of institutions such as family, army, higher education, marriage, asylum system, or refugee detention. Calling them ‘institutional’ stresses their omnipresent nature. As illuminated by Glaser and Strauss (1971), the list of such events that can drastically change a person’s life includes war, matriculation, graduation, military conscription, and job application, among many others. Such events are usually experienced by other members of a social group to which the person belongs, although to different degrees of intensity: they do not function as turning points to all group members who are affected by the same institutions (ibid.; Teruya & Hser, 2010). As noted by Glaser and Strauss (1971), these turning points are ‘in close connection with formal organisations’ and institutions such as the institution of marriage, employment, or law enforcement. The power of these institutions is often used on a daily basis as an instrument to impact upon people’s lives, thus such turning points can also be called ‘instrumental’. The emphasis is here on people’s frequent inability to overthrow their effect. Thus institutional, or instrumental, events such as war, abuse in detention, or anti-gay political campaigns at home turn people into refugees, illegal migrants, or victims of trafficking and smuggling. They can also strengthen migrants’ decisions to return or not return home and to settle or not at destination (Achilli, 2019; Achillli & Sanchez, 2021; Grotti et al., 2019; Merrill, 2019).

On the contrary, what Ellis and Triandafyllidou (in this volume) define as ‘personified turning points’ refer to much more personal and individually experienced encounters related to more intimate relations. Such encounters can be illuminated by the loss of significant others (ibid.) or a friend’s betrayal (Glaser & Strauss, 1971). Studies on retired migration illuminate that older women often become migrants as a result of widowhood or divorce (Benson, 2009; Fokkema & Naderi, 2013; King et al., 2017).

Third, turning points can be understood in terms of causing ‘abrupt’ versus ‘incremental changes’ (Elder et al., 1991; Pickles & Rutter, 1991; Rutter, 1996; Gottlib & Wheaton, 1997). We can respectively refer to them as ‘visible’ (or overt) versus ‘hidden’ (or covert) turning points. As noted by Denzin and Lincoln (2001), the latter turning points often pass as ‘unremarkable, barely felt, taken for granted and non-problematic’ when they happen. Their impact draws attention only with time and in the light of other critical events (ibid.), implicating their cumulative effect. Discovering this cumulative effect becomes part of the interaction between the informant and the researcher, or a distinct feature of interpretive biography (ibid.). In fact, informants often find it hard to talk and even think about certain experiences before they discover their true meaning together with the interpretive biographer (ibid.). This is highlighted by interviews with sensitive groups (Czarniawska, 2004) such as pregnant migrant-women, undocumented migrants who are victims of international trafficking and sexual abuse, or migrants who are racial or sexual minorities (Danisi et al., 2021; Grotti et al., 2019; Merrill, 2019).

Fourth, Denzin (1989) also points out that some critical events can be ‘major’, causing significant changes while others can be ‘minor’ or ‘illuminative’ of the former, which implies the existence of turning point clusters. In this book, we will therefore also distinguish between ‘single’ major turning points and ‘clustered’ turning points.

Regardless of its cause and directionality, the turning point is always highly emotional because it leads the person to drastically change their life. Whether caused by an institutional force or by an intimate relationship with a specific person, the turning point is invariably perceived as emotional by someone who experiences it. Its effect is always deeply emotional (Denzin, 1989) – that is, reflected in the individual’s ‘need to try out the new self, to explore and validate the new and either exciting or fearful conceptions’ (Glaser & Strauss, 1971: 100).

In this connection, Koenig-Kellas et al. (2008) view the turning point as ‘a relational event that captures a critical moment’ in a person’s life, thus stressing its relational and individual character. As further noted by Kallen (1950: 26), ‘turning points are critical incidents that force a person to recognize that s/he is not the same as s/he used to be’. When turning points happen, they lead the person to understand that the previous life plan has been disrupted and that the person must improvise (ibid.). Acting as ‘signposts of human agency’, turning points imply that the person should learn how to go with the flow, how to make new decisions, and how to navigate new social relations (Denzin, 2011, 2014. For example, we can see impoverished women from Eastern Europe and Africa who take precarious gig jobs in the Italian and Dutch domestic work sector (Marchetti, 2014a, b), desperate Mexican peasants who cross the US border illegally and trail dangerous pathways toward their American dream (Achilli, 2019; Achillli & Sanchez, 2021), or pregnant young women from the Middle East who, being either naïve or completely reckless, engage in a dangerous boat trip to Europe without understanding precisely where they are going and how they are going to survive there (Grotti et al., 2019).

Thinking about such people, Glaser and Strauss (1971: 92) further note that turning points lead to an ‘irreversible transformation of perception: once having changed, there is no going back’. The irreversibility of time is another feature that makes the turning point distinct from any other remarkable event (ibid.). This may perhaps explain why these determined pregnant women who cross the EU border illegally and about whom Vanessa Grotti and colleagues write (Grotti et al., 2019) prefer to undergo various hardships but never return home. Nor did there ever exist any backward opportunity for Luciana, in Most Beautiful Island, who would rather continue working in the dangerous casino than repatriate and reunite with her abusive partner.

1.8 Epiphany – A Window into the Migrant’s Soul

A distinct feature of interpretive biographic inquiry, when compared with other qualitative methods, is its grounds in interpretive interactionalism. It is through the prism of interpretive interactionalism that interpretive biographers make a meaningful lived experience under study highly ‘visible to the reader’ (Denzin, 2011). In other words, interpretive biography aims to illuminate and analyse how turning points (or specific critical events) may ‘radically alter and shape the meanings persons give to themselves and their lives’ (ibid.). And such in-depth meanings can be captured and synthesised into a comprehensive interpretive theory only through people’s epiphanies or through their inner self-enlightening thoughts about their own life and the irreversible changes that affect it.

This irreversibility of life perception is then articulated in epiphanies, or people’s ‘mini-theories about self and society’ (Denzin & Lincoln, 2001: 5). Challenging the methodological nationalism, migrants’ epiphanies throw light on how different people of the same nationality can be (Amelina, 2013; Barglowski, 2019). Such reflections may include inner thoughts of being a gay migrant in America, a pregnant migrant woman in a Greek detention centre, or a lonely teenager (an unaccompanied minor) disempowered by a smuggling network. How many of these voices will remain unheard or not understood to the fullest – just because they have never been part of the interpretive biographic research? They will forever remain a closed window through which we shall never be able to see the migrant’s soul – the epiphanic window that will remain locked for us by traditional methodologies.

Epiphany is thus another angle to think about how biographic meanings may crystallise. Denzin’s (1989) theory of interpretive biography emphasises the pivotal role of epiphany as a state of deep, insightful reflection upon your own life and the phenomenon under study. Interpretive biographic scholars see epiphany as a narrative of self-enlightenment and critical revelation that reflects the transformation of the basic structure of the informant’s life (ibid.), gives accountability to their turning points (O’Sullivan, 1999), and ‘illuminates personal character’ (Gottzén, 2019: 22).

Summing up the work of Denzin (1989) and O’Sullivan (1999), there are the four basic features of an interpretive biographic epiphany. First, all epiphanies that informants develop are emotional and ground-breaking for their agency and identities, although to different degrees of immediacy for different people. In most cases, epiphanies are ‘relived’ more than once (Denzin, 1989) – or ‘retold’ – especially during the interview (O’Sullivan, 1999), which is their second feature. We can recognise this experience of ‘reliving’ in the traumatic stories of border-crossing pregnant women (Grotti et al., 2019), Ukrainian domestic workers in Italy (Marchetti, 2014b), or Russian women who become sex workers in Germany (Rosenthal & Bogner, 2009). They often admit that they are not the same as they were (ibid.). Does this mean that the reported change was not taking place during the interview?

O’Sullivan (1999: 27) further argues that ‘a retold epiphany is actually the turning point paradigm shift and evidence that substantiates the reborn person’. Joseph Campbell (2008[1949]) calls such a moment an ‘identity boon’. In fact, in many cases, people understand how they change not immediately but with time and through many interactions, including their interaction with the interpretive biographer. Even if someone feels an immediate change, this is mostly likely the beginning of an epiphanic passage rather than the finalising epiphanic moment itself. In this reference, we should note that in biographic research all epiphanies are retold because the researcher was not present with the informant at the moment of the actual turning point and therefore did not witness it. The interpretive biographer thus analyses all epiphanies in their narrated, or retold, form only.

1.9 Epiphanic Moment – Confused Temporality

The method of interpretive biography thus pays close attention to both critical events that change people’s life course and their own understanding of these changes. In his highly influential work, Norman Denzin (1989) synthesises these two foci into one single concept of ‘epiphanic moment’ – or an interactional moment that leaves a mark on the person’s life and during which the person develops an epiphany.

However, Denzin’s (ibid.) seminal book was just one of the very first attempts to understand the biographic method’s complexities and his theory has remained unfinished. It is true that in interpretive biography the concept of ‘epiphany’ has been central since then. However, its structure and, consequently, the precise dimensions of its analysis remain under-studied. This problem has not been resolved even although Denzin himself tried to systematise his ‘epiphanic approach’ in a number of his later works. A starting point in interpretive-biographic research, the ‘epiphanic moment’ concept, nevertheless, continues to confuse scholars in their understanding of epiphanies, turning points, and – what is the most important – the temporal and spatial relations between these two categories of analysis.

While grasping the meaning of interpretive biography, the concept of ‘epiphanic moment’ still depicts the suggested research paradigm in a kind of dogmatic way. Indeed, it equalises the concepts of ‘turning point’ and ‘epiphany’ without illuminating rather complex relations between them. These two quite distinct concepts are thus misleadingly used, in his earlier works, synonymously, overlooking the vast diversity of their temporal characteristics. The ‘epiphanic moment’ concept makes an impression that all critical events and their traces in human life should take place simultaneously and that the person should develop an epiphany immediately after experiencing a specific crucial event.

The initial definition by Denzin (1989), which is grounded in James Joyce’s main principle of the stream-of-consciousness technique in writing, defines epiphany as both the intellectual (reflexive) capacity of the person and the event that fosters this reflexivity as if they had both occurred simultaneously. This definition is inaccurately based on the uniformity of the temporal synchrony between an event and its understanding. In fact, such synchrony does work very well in fiction for James Joyce’s characters. They live in a fictional – artificial – world created by the author himself and the author (as the creator of this world) has the power to be present there with the character at the moment of the encounter (Bakhtin, 1975, 1981). In this reference, Mikhail Bakhtin (1975, 1981) and Paul Ricoeur (1984) argue that fictional time is different from real time in its speed and processing. Fictional time flows faster than normal time in reality, allowing the protagonist to process the experienced encounter in their mind much sooner so that both the encounter and its reflection take place almost simultaneously (ibid.). However, in real life there are many experiences that pass unnoticed until a certain moment and become understood by the person after their identity becomes more mature (ibid.; Bakhtin, 1975; Giddens, 2000), while the researcher witnesses the informant’s reflexivity only at the moment of the interview (ibid.; O’Sullivan, 1999). The epiphanic moment is actually the moment of the interview, which is separated by time from the real-life experience. What happens during this time is often left outside the focus of research.

For example, in the movie ‘Spanglish’, Flor (an undocumented Mexican domestic worker in the US) demands that her rapidly integrating adolescent daughter Cristina should behave like a Mexican girl from their hometown. Cristina strenuously objects to this argument. Then we suddenly hear the adult Cristina in a voiceover admitting that she has finally come to self-identify as her mother’s daughter. This is an epiphany of integration change for Cristina. However, we cannot know how fast and under which circumstances this identity change has occurred because Cristina’s epiphanic moment has been decontextualised.

The reality, in fact, proves to be much more complex than the cinematographic portrayal of Cristina’s self-identification or Joyce’s world of fiction. The aforementioned work of Glaser and Strauss (1971) is devoted specifically to temporal passages that separate crucial historical and personal events from the personal or public understanding of their impact upon a person or society. In their theory of ‘status passages’, Glaser and Strauss (ibid.) analyse various trajectories of how people’s social statuses and moral conditions may change after they experience historically or institutionally important events such as conscription, graduation, marriage, or war. The herein illuminated notion of time conveys a complex structure of such critical events, in which identity change, associated with the epiphany, occurs gradually.

Although the biographic approaches of Denzin (1989) and Glaser and Strauss (1971) may seemingly complement each other, the missing epistemological element is the synergy between critical moment and dynamics of identity change. While Denzin (1989) simplifies the temporality of epiphanic relations, Glaser and Strauss (1971) do not vividly illuminate the difference between historical changes and very personal impacts. This approach may seemingly resonate with methodological nationalism, leaving the impression that all people should experience the same historical event or traditional institutional passage in the same manner.

In this connection, both Denzin (1989, 2011) and Glaser and Strauss (1971) further argue that their theoretical ideas should be taken only as a starting point for developing more substantive theories of meaningful biographic experience. When translated into the rhetoric of migration studies, this implies theories that should challenge the methodological nationalism and lead to the further evolution of global methodologies.

1.10 Epiphanic Triangle

Scholars who work with the interpretive biographic method continue to look for ways to re-conceptualise the relationship between turning points and epiphanies and to better understand the temporal characteristics of epiphanies. Migration scholars continue to puzzle over the temporal characteristics of labour market integration (Penninx, 2018). They strive to understand why the migrant who felt integrated a week ago no longer does today (ibid.). Within these lines, we would like to stress the following three distinct features of interpretive biographic research, or the three interconnected angles to view how people give meanings to their life experiences: the turning point, the epiphany, and the passage of time between them that enables the turning point to become the epiphany. This interim period is important for our understanding of the epiphanic moment, which has been illuminated in Cultural Studies and Cinema Studies by Joseph Campbell’s ‘cultural monomyth’ theory (1991, 2008[1949]).

In this connection, Gottzén (2019) argues that every turning point has a ‘script’ or scenario that ‘reflects and influences how changes and decisive moments of life are perceived and narrated’. This ‘turning point script’ is the space, or the socio-cultural distance, that stands between the turning point and the consequent epiphany. This is a period during which the person comes to understand the shaping biographic meaning – a period of time rich in social relations and agency work. Such scripts intersect with the processes that Glaser and Strauss (1971) view as ‘status passages’ – or periods of socio-economic progression and growth when the person moves from one social status to another as dictated by societal norms. However, turning points do not always follow institutional rules (ibid.). They are of a more individualised nature. Glaser and Strauss (ibid.) note that some status passages actually coincide with periods of personal crisis and contain turning points, while others simply indicate institutional progression with little to null impact upon identity.

We can therefore conceptualise the turning point script as a ‘crisis passage’ or ‘epiphanic passage’ during which the person finds themself in the conditions of identity crisis as a result of the turning point and develops an epiphany. Campbell (1991, 2008[1949]) notes that a critical event brings forward the basic existential question: ‘What is the meaning of being alive?’. What we understand as epiphany, however, leads us to the answer and constitutes the triumph of our identity work. He also stresses that the process of self-discovery, or a search of the biographical meaning, has a very complex, although rather conventional, structure. Cole (2008) refers to this process as an ‘enactment of epiphanies’: their ‘spatial aspect’ is illuminated by identity transformations that follow the turning point. Such transformations show how epiphanies are shaped. In order to understand how turning points enable epiphanies, ‘it is important to look at the period preceding or following the turning point and at the people who are challenging the person’ (Glaser & Strauss, 1971: 97). For example, Luciana’s entrance to the casino had been enabled by a chain of preceding events. She had been initially jeopardised by her abusive partner and his criminal network back home so that she knew she had crossed the point of no return. Later, disenchanted with US immigration law, she felt restricted in her documented employment. With her life structured by the past experience of domestic violence and the current restrictive policies, in this array of institutionally-personified factors she felt ready to take the casino challenge as the only opportunity to enable her safe stay in the country.

In other words, that gig job was more than an isolated event of luck for Luciana. Her unexpected casino job was part of a complex symbolic and relational script that Luciana had started to enact long before her settlement in New York. In the terminology of Norman Denzin (2011), the casino event had a specific ‘turning point structure’ without boundaries, bypassing the Bronx casino walls and intersecting with the space of Luciana’s past as well as with wider spaces of power.

Her epiphanic passage can be compared with what Joseph Campbell (1991, 2008[1949]) calls the ‘hero’s journey’ through existing social relations toward the ‘golden fleece’ of self-discovery. For Luciana, the golden fleece was her self-discovery as a fierce fighter and a stronger migrant-woman who felt capable of supporting herself economically. Synonymous with our ‘epiphanic passage’, Campbell’s (2008[1949]) ‘journey’ metaphor points to the person’s progression from a critical event to a moment of self-revelation and illuminates the triangular relationship between the turning point, the epiphany, and the bridge between them.

This interpretive biographic framework echoes the Pythagorean theorem, according to which the square of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the legs. This implies rather complex spatial relations with the Pythagorean triangle, as shown in Fig. 1.1.

Fig. 1.1
An illustration of the epiphanic triangle that consists of a turning point and epiphany represents the epiphanic passage and has spatial relations with the Pythagorean theorem.

Epiphanic triangle

Full size image

The hypothenuse is more than just a linear distance: it is a derivative from complex operations with the legs. Therefore, the appropriate value of the hypothenuse can only be found after we carefully explore the legs. On analogy, we can compare the relationship between the turning point and the epiphany with the hypothenuse (diagonal), while the legs of the triangle can symbolise the progression from one turning point to another and accumulation of reflexivity during the crisis passage. We cannot understand how a particular turning point affects the epiphanic moment unless we carefully explore what is happening during the epiphanic passage (shaded) because many things may happen between a critical event and its reflection.

The epiphanic passage is what scholars in humanities and social sciences define as the ‘hero’s journey’ (Campbell, 2008[1949]) and ‘work of agency’, or ‘social navigation’ (Triandafyllidou, 2018) toward the ‘golden fleece’ or the biographic ‘boon’ (Salla, 2002). The work of agency during the epiphanic passage can be summarised as social navigation that is initiated by the turning point (or the ‘call of adventure’ (Campbell, 2008[1949]) and directed toward the epiphanic moment of discovering your identity boon, or your self-positioning, toward a specific phenomenon. The found or lost identity boon is thus about who you are and what your own ‘meaning of being alive’ (ibid.).

1.11 Ordinary ‘Heroes’: Third-Country Nationals on the EU Labour Market

Showing the lives of ordinary people, our book is based on 98 biographic interviews conducted in seven countries, namely: 10 in Italy; 11 in Switzerland, Finland, and the UK each; 14 in the Czech Republic and Canada each; and 27 in Denmark.

The choice of the countries (Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Italy, the UK, and Switzerland) was determined by their political-institutional approaches towards welfare services, immigration, and labour market structure. For example, Denmark and Canada are countries with strong welfare systems, which, nonetheless, have implemented a variety of flexicurity measures. Southern European countries, meanwhile, have continued to rely upon more rigid labour market policies and have provided fewer social provisions from the welfare state (Eichhorst et al., 2009; Giugni, 2010; Simonazzi & Villa, 2010; Van Aerschot & Daenzer, 2016). Furthermore, very little is known about integration schemes established in new destination countries in central and eastern Europe. These countries seem to create policy as situations arise and often with little knowledge of their refugee population (Burnett, 2015). However, countries such as the Czech Republic more systematically tend to adopt ad-hoc EU grant-driven schemes than other EU central-eastern Member States (Drbohlav & Valenta, 2014; Kušniráková, 2014).

The selected countries thus vary considerably in terms of their political-institutional approaches towards unemployment, the welfare state, and Europeanisation. On the one hand, these countries have some ‘contingent convergence’ of instruments, goals, and outcomes in labour market regulations (Eichhorst & Konle-Seidl, 2008). Their employment and social policies are marked with the common principle ‘work-first approach’ (Triandafyllidou, 2017). On the other hand, substantial differences in their policymaking dynamics and policy implementation have led to the establishment of diverse employment policy regimes (Anxo et al., 2010; De Beer & Schills, 2009a, b; Gallie, 2007a, b, c; Rosenthal & Bogner, 2009).

Apart from this, the selected countries differ in other relevant institutional dimensions that may affect the dynamics within the integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers. Several studies have supported the idea that participatory and decentralised political contexts produce more responsive and redistributive policymaking (Simon, 1989; Calamai, 2009; Costa-I-Font, 2010), which sets the scene for a broader range of ‘integration-related’ policies. Countries also differ in terms of political institutional opportunities offered to public and private actors to deal with integration. For example, Switzerland, Canada, and to a certain extent the United Kingdom, have an institutional design that supports subsidiarity as well as decentralisation and multi-level governance. At the same time, countries such as the Czech Republic maintain strong centralisation and a weak culture of governance. Hence, integration patterns may evolve differently depending on the political-institutional context.

Thus, following a ‘most different system design’ (Przeworski & Teune, 1970), we have chosen the countries that might provoke both similarities and differences in migrants’ biographies and their narratives of labour market integration.

Thinking about the crossroads of integration, migrant agency, and meaningful biographic experience, we seek to find events that change migrants’ trajectories and self-positioning. We then examine consequences that these events have for migrants’ labour market integration or the dynamics of their progression in their employment. We also explore migrants’ reflections on these changes (including their perceptions of gender, class, and race/ethnicity).

The conducted interviews were semi-structured, each lasting between 2 and 3 hours, and included the following specific questions to the informants:

  • How did it happen that you are now here in this country? Tell me a little about yourself.

  • How did you manage to get this job (if the person has one at the moment)? Or:

  • Did you have any career in your home country? What was your educational and professional experience there?

  • What prevents you from getting a (better) job now?

  • Think about an event here in this country that has made you change your attitude to employment, justice, or life in general?

  • Has anything like this happened to you back home?

  • What expectations/aspirations did you have when you were moving to this country? How have those changed over time?

  • What has been the most unpleasant event that has happened to you here?

  • Have you ever felt that people here may treat you or think about you not the way you would like to be treated? Why do you think it happens? How do you try to cope with this?

  • What are your professional plans/aspirations for the future? What are you trying to do to realise them? Why do you think it does (not) work?

  • To what extent have your family members/local people/other migrants/colleagues been supportive or disruptive of your plans?

1.12 When Epiphany Meets Agency: The Structure of the Book

Each chapter included in the book has an empirical and methodological value. While analysing a specific country-case of labour market integration, each chapter illuminates specific nuances of the interpretive biographic method in its application to integration studies.

To what extent do material benefits remain important and to what extent can migrants be resilient when facing their loss? The chapter about Switzerland explores the relationship between the material and non-material (or humanistic) in labour market integration. It invites to think about what is more important for the informants: to conquer the world in economic terms and get back to career or to revive fragile human relations. The chapter specifically examines conflicting epiphanies that the interviewed female migrants develop about the meaningfulness of achieving professional status abroad versus remaining good parents and good people. The chapter examines the epiphanic conflict between economic incentives for and moral benefits from migration that migrants re-evaluate when dealing which such critical events as divorce, separation from children, or imprisonment. The ambivalent nature of such complex identity boons is illuminated by the trajectories and epiphanic moments of migrant women who are mothers seeking to restore their relationship with children and looking for positive meanings in the experienced traumatic events. Maria Mexi shows how such women deal with new personified or institutionally-personified or both turning points that are steered by their ‘mentors’ from their new ethnic- and gender-solidarity networks either in prison or in a migrant support centre.

The intersecting phenomena of epiphanic ambivalence and personification of turning points are further addressed in the chapter about Denmark. Illuminating the gendered nature of the epiphanic conflict, Katrine Sofie Bruun Bennetzen and Michelle Pace examine the integration trajectories of highly educated women who are family migrants. The chapter explores their agentic strategies that are activated through personified turning points within various contexts of gender relations. The multi-directionality and dynamics of herein emerging epiphanic passages manifests itself in the women’s progression from aspirational failure at destination and consequent frustration toward hope for expected decision on asylum applications or obtaining a relatively good job. The chapter also illuminates how ambivalent epiphanies may be grounded in gendered clusters of turning points (such as divorce at origin or legal status at destination, on the one hand, and events related to female solidarity groups, on the other).

The migrants’ management of their own epiphanic conflicts is further addressed in detail in the chapter about Canada. The authors assess contradictory epiphanies and epiphanic passages within the institutional context of Canadian Immigration law that enables migrants’ access to a desired legal status. This is illuminated by migrants’ accumulation of the ‘Canadian experience’ and waiting for the ‘permanent resident’ status, the latter becoming a credential for secure employment. Claire Ellis and Anna Triandafyllidou carefully explore the role of the state and the global pandemic crisis in the creation of such ‘waiting’ epiphanic passages.

Developing the ‘epiphanic passage’ theme further, the chapter about Finland brings forward its specific type – the ‘toad pool’, which becomes a socio-anthropological metaphor for a down-scaled, tedious, long-term, and eventually unrewarding job in a foreign country. Quivine Ndomo and Nathan Lillie note that such ‘toad pool’ stories are normally hidden from the public eye despite their highly dynamic nature. Through the heuristic tool of ‘disaggregated agency’ [adapted from Emirbayer & Mische, 1998 and Katz, 2004], Ndomo and Lillie show the interpretive dynamics within the ‘toad pool’ epiphanic passage: from high-stake aspirations to despair and civic death – the death of the hero that happens as a cumulative effect in their failed migrant agency.

The chapter about the Czech Republic further illuminates the illusory nature of the cumulative effect, which often takes place in epiphanic passages. The authors thus unravel the cumulative effect of a major international event such as war and show how it is operationalised through a series of very specific critical encounters, which may have different meanings for different migrants. To what extent can the war affect biographies and epiphanies? When the whole world goes upside down (war), does it mean that your own small word is being ruined in response? Not always, as Olga Gheorghiev and Dino Numerato argue. They show how the cumulative effect of the war becomes intensified by impeded educational rights and career opportunities for skilled women from Syria and Ukraine. The chapter analyses in more depth the relationship between parallel critical events within a turning point cluster and looks specifically into the relationship between institutional and personified turning points. Gheorghiev and Numerato further show the emergence of overlapping epiphanic triangles and unfinished epiphanies or such migrant’s self-positioning when their identity boon has not yet been found.

The cumulative effect specifically in the management of epiphanic triangles is studied in-depth in the chapter about the UK and is conceptualised by Francesca Caló and Simone Baglioni as the ‘management of time’. Exploring the lives of high-skill migrants, Caló and Baglioni unveil nuances of migrants’ precarious temporality of ‘being lost nowhere’.

The cumulative epiphanic effect is further addressed in the Italian chapter. Mattia Collini illuminates the role of ‘turning point clusters’ in labour market integration. He explores the dynamics of various turning points that affect a migrant and notes their inter-connectivity.

In the concluding chapter of the book, Irina Isaakyan, Anna Triandafyllidou, and Simone Baglioni reinterpret the findings from the previous chapters in the light of the ‘cultural monomyth’ theory elaborated by Joseph Campbell (2008[1949]). The authors use the heuristic device of the ‘cultural monomyth’ in reference to a recognised socio-cultural script around an epiphanic passage to explore in-depth relations within the informants’ epiphanic triangles and finalise the interpretive theory of labour market integration – a theory that is meant to enrich existing global methodologies.