There were no posts in this blog for ten months for some objective reasons. I am currently writing the book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia to be published by Manchester University Press.
In 2022, I had some publications, which came out but were not covered in the blog. This post presents the digest of those and forthcoming publications.
1. Together with Andrea Lizama and Denisse Sepúlveda, I co-edited a special section on social mobility and inequality issued in Sociological Research Online.
Cite article: Lizama-Loyola, A., Sepúlveda, D., & Vanke, A. (2022). Making Sense of Social Mobility in Unequal Societies. Sociological Research Online, 27(1), 95–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/13607804211066120
The special section takes a global perspective on different aspects of subjective social mobility and inequality. It includes six contributions covering the themes of political debate about social mobility in the UK and collective social mobility of working-class communities in Wales, intersectional inequality experienced by British-born Bengali Muslim women of working-class origin and educational mobility of people from different social backgrounds in Chile, social mobility of rural students in China and Chilean people’s experiences of long-range upward mobility shaped by meritocratic narratives.
- Introduction: Making Sense of Social Mobility in Unequal Societies by Andrea Lizama-Loyola, Denisse Sepúlveda and Alexandrina Vanke
- Talking the Talk of Social Mobility: The Political Performance of a Misguided Agenda by Nicola Ingram and Sol Gamsu
- Re-Imagining Social Mobility: The Role of Relationality, Social Class and Place in Qualitative Constructions of Mobility by Louise Folkes
- ‘I Don’t Want to Completely Lose Myself’: Social Mobility as Movement Across Classed, Ethnicised, and Gendered Spaces by Berenice Scandone
- Different Routes to University: Exploring Intersectional and Multi-Dimensional Social Mobility under a Comparative Approach in Chile by Denisse Sepúlveda and Andrea Lizama-Loyola
- Hysteresis Effects and Emotional Suffering: Chinese Rural Students’ First Encounters with the Urban University by Jiexiu Chen
- Disentangling Meritocracy among the Long-Range Upwardly Mobile: The Chilean Case by Malik Fercovic
2. My short piece on multi-sited ethnography was published in Interaction. Interview. Interpretation. It contributes to the section INTER-Encyclopaedia with the explanation of the main ideas of multi-sited ethnography as a methodological approach, which is relevant for the study of dynamically changing static or moving subjects and objects.
Cite article: Vanke A.V. INTER-Encyclopedia: Multi-sited Ethnography. Interaction. Interview. Interpretation. 2022. Vol. 14. No. 1. P. 123-129. DOI: https://doi.org/10.19181/inter.2022.14.1.6
3. My chapter on the reconceptualisation of the working class in contemporary Russia is going to be out at FrontPage in January 2023 as part of Handbook on Sociology of Inequality in BRICS Countries edited by Kiran Odhav and Jayanathan Govender. The Handbook with the Foreword by Prof Sari Hanafi, the current President of the International Sociological Association, includes 18 contributions on objective and subjective inequalities by social scholars from Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.
In the chapter, I critically analyse the dichotomies of ‘Soviet’/ ‘post-Soviet’ and ‘socialist’/ ‘postsocialist’. In the light of debates about whether social researchers can still use these binary oppositions, I argue that both concepts of ‘post-Soviet working class’ and ‘postsocialist working class’ are helpful for the understanding of Russian society, especially when we need to explain its social imaginaries and generational divides. But these concepts allow researchers to grasp slightly different things and should be applied reflexively taking into account decolonial critique. I wrote this chapter several years ago. But it contributes to the current debate on Russia’s social classes in Sociology, Social Anthropology and Area Studies.
Alexandrina Vanke 