Introduction

There is no single way of understanding migration, but the one I know of is to think of it as a journey with a certain goal. In times of global migration, there are countless people on the move every day. They intentionally set forth to make new achievements and take new chances in life. Thus, it often surprises me that there is hardly any empirical research that emphasises the empowering aspects of migration experience, and only a few researchers who conceptualise migration as an exciting, hopeful, future-oriented biographical project (see Morokvasic, 1991, 1993; Apitzsch, 2000, 2003; Lutz, 2000). Instead, migration is understood mostly as a biographical crisis defined through a trajectory of suffering: concepts that stress the disturbing and uncomfortable nature of the migration experience. In this context the emphasis is on the hardship of change, displacement and disappearance of well-known everyday life's patterns. Hence, the concept of turning point comes to the fore.

Interestingly enough, Anselm Strauss, who first came up with the concept of the turning point, was interested mainly in research on chronic illness and the suffering of patients affected by it. Similarly, the way in which some scholars in migration studies refer to this concept seems to be biased on a notion of suffering caused by sudden life changes, of which migration leaves the greatest imprint. According to this conceptualisation, migrants are viewed as individuals who have lost control of their Schicksal (destiny) and who are hardly able to exert an influence on their own lives. This seems problematic insofar as migration is only very rarely an unintentional act, and can therefore hardly be compared with a deadly illness or any other sudden, unexpected life change that we experience and over which we have no control. Since migration is usually a meaningful and future-oriented activity, migrants are entrepreneurs willing to take a risk to change their current biographical situation in the first place.