This open access book explores the lives and careers of migrating artists with the purpose to understand how they make use of their migrant-networks and how this process interacts with decisions they make about immigration and career development. Situated at the crossroads of Migration Studies and Elite Studies, this interdisciplinary research is based on sixty interpretive biographic interviews with opera singers from the former Soviet bloc who work in various places across Europe and beyond. The book raises the question to what extent they exercise agency as migrants and professionals and to what extent they preserve their professional elitism on the transnational level. The case of these migrant-artists serves to illuminate the dynamics of a wider phenomenon - global elite migrations - which is compared with an intergalactic journey. Through this sociological metaphor, the book offers a new analytical framework to think about the “agency-network” nexus.

Irina Isaakyan is Senior Research Associate at the Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. Holding PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK (2008), she has many years of university teaching and research experience in different countries, including Russia, Scotland, Italy and Canada. Her research interests include integration of skilled migrants, diaspora nationalism, elite migrations, migration and gender, interpretive research, and post-communist studies. Prior to joining the Toronto Metropolitan University, she had worked on a number of research projects at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, exploring migrants’ integration in a variety of national settings.