Category: Theory

Through growing roses, and what I found there (spoiler: climate change)

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

I delayed writing on the topic of gardening and growing roses so many times. It seemed to me that writing about these small everyday issues in a time of polycrisis was an unaffordable luxury (and a guilty pleasure). However, observing sociological and global trends in the countryside garden of the Moscow region, which lies in climate zone five, prompted me to sit down and write my thoughts out.

I am an apprentice gardener who started growing roses several years ago. My first involvement in this activity overlapped with my post-PhD life. By adopting this active hobby, I could not have imagined that growing, and especially growing roses, would captivate me so much. Apart from the emotional involvement, growing drew me into sensing changes in the seasons and experiencing the weather atmosphere in the garden.

Recently, I came across an English translation of a fairy tale, Roses: A Social Hypothesis, written by the German sociologist Georg Simmel. In this short piece, Simmel reflects on the emergence of inequalities in a fictional village, where some residents could cultivate beautiful roses thanks to their efforts and the good quality of soil on their plots, while non-rose owners cultivated envy and resentment towards their luckier neighbours. Robert van Krieken, the translator of this tale, comments on its moral, saying that in such a way Simmel shows the impossibility of getting rid of inequalities, and claims that ‘[t]he pursuit of equality is in many respects a Sisyphean endeavour’.

As a sociologist of inequality, I would debate this interpretation of Simmel’s work and disagree with van Krieken’s comparison of the pursuit of equality with a ‘Sisyphean endeavour’. Nevertheless, Simmel’s reflection on roses evoking feelings in people is of great interest to sociological analysis. I will leave it as an open question whether roses in a neighbour’s garden really evoke envy and resentment, or perhaps admiration and pleasure, while being observed publicly by the village residents. But what is undeniable is that growing and viewing roses is an affective experience.

I was convinced of this when I planted out the first thirteen shrubs of roses with my little relatives back in the spring of 2022. Among them were varieties of roses bred in different countries, including Russia, Germany, France and Britain, which we bought from a local rose nursery. At that time, I was curious about the connections between literature and growing, and little by little my attention was drawn to English roses bred by the gardener David Austin on his farm in Shropshire, in the Midlands, and named after fictional characters and writers.

Thus, a new literary and gardening world of roses opened up to me. That is how Lady of Shalott and A Shropshire Lad joined the community of roses in the garden.

To my surprise, David Austin’s roses proved to be popular among Russian growers, kindly calling them ‘ostinki’, or just English roses (‘angliiskie rosy’). The secret behind this popularity lies in the fact that English roses are unpretentious to cultivate and resilient in low temperatures. They survive the Russian winter well, being grafted onto rose hips to remain frost-resistant. In climate zone five and cooler, gardeners usually cover roses with protective materials or wooden boxes to save them during winter.

However, not all roses winter easily. From my observation, the tender Queen of Sweden, an English rose, wakes up best of all in the spring, while French varieties, such as the charming Emilien Guillot, freeze slightly and need some time to come back to life for a new growing season. I have quickly learnt that roses are sensory creatures, as they react to fluctuations in temperature and weather conditions. When it rains too much, they need additional care and treatment against dampness. When it is hot, they need to be watered well and fed with fertilisers. From time to time, they need to be protected from aphid invasions if ants create anthills nearby.

Returning to literature and roses, I was surprised to read the news about that A Shropshire Lad, the English rose named after the main character from the poem of the same name by Alfred Edward Housman, is no longer sold in the UK because of climate change which has resulted in evolving diseases and pests, and heatwaves on the island. However, it is still possible to find this rose in rose nurseries and garden centres in Russia. The same is true for the William Morris rose, also created by David Austin, which has stopped being sold in the UK but can be found in southern Russian regions, while still being too warm-loving and hard-growing in northern regions.

I have noticed that the experience of growing roses and other plants has widened my senses of perception and helped me think-feel locally and globally at once. Through growing roses, I found that this activity makes people more sensitive not only to atmospheric fluctuations and weather change in local areas but also to the global atmosphere and climate change.

XXXV

On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear to friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching, all to die.

East and west on fields forgotten
Bleach the bones of comrades slain,
Lovely lads and dead and rotten;
None that go return again.

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

From the poem A Shropshire Lad by A. E. Housman (1896)

My response to the book reviews on The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

It has been a year today since the publication of ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’. In this blogpost, I would like to reflect on the journey it has been for me, and the ripples it has created.

First of all, the alternative genre of writing that I crafted for the book aimed to engage readers in a dialogue about Russia’s workers and their place in the global international solidarity networks. This aim was complicated by the Russia-Ukraine war, which was for me like a thunderbolt at the beginning and  in the following years created cracks within and between societies. Nevertheless, as an author I managed to break away from the hegemonic discourses and create an alternative site for intellectual communication about the everyday struggles of Russia’s workers under the wars and crises that we as humanity are now experiencing globally.  

I am very pleased that two positive book reviews, one by sociologist Claudio Morrison (UK) and the other by sociologist Christopher Altamura (US), have appeared in The Russian Review and International Sociology journals, and with more to come this year. 

Both reviews raised important questions about my argument about worker’s engagement in everyday struggle under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. 

Focusing on my criticism of the discursive construct of ‘Russian workers’ patience’, Morrison suggested that I had not sufficiently engaged with research work by sociologist Simon Clarke and colleagues who studied factory regimes, strikes and labour movements in Russia in the 1990s. I agree in part with this criticism, but I want to stress that I do not dismiss Clarke’s approach. In fact, although I mainly focus on working-class neighbourhoods rather than on social relations in production, I engage with Clarke’s scholarship through a critical dialogue. This is because I look at workers in Russian society from the perspective of the 2010s and the early 2020s, which is different from the 1990s version due to the evolution of the political regime and class structure. 

I would argue here that neoliberal neo-authoritarianism prompts social scholars to look at more tacit forms of struggle embedded in everyday life. Such a reorientation does not allow us to argue that workers in Russia (and elsewhere) are patient or do nothing to change their situation. It means that any form of political participation should be examined in relation to the regime and the social structure of society as a whole. I think that the relationships between class struggle, the regime and the social structure were not equally central to Clarke’s research in Russia. As a sociologist writing from the 2020s, I cannot overlook the relationships between these three elements, which together form the basis for ordinary people’s lives and struggles.

At the same time, the ethnographic approach by Clarke and colleagues has been an important foundation for my research on workers, also in terms of methodology, which I have had to develop further, as the changing social reality has forced us to push methodological boundaries. At the same time, we are currently at that stage of academic crisis in which we have to develop not only methods of data collection and analysis, but also methods of writing and dissemination, as we discursively represent ordinary people in texts in the era of catastrophes and war dramas.

Other questions raised by Morrison partly overlap with Altamura’s. 

While Morrison wonders whether the concept of habitus works well to explain the ethno-nationalism of workers found in my ethnography, Altamura doubts that the xenophobic attitude of Russian workers can be progressive in terms of class struggle. I would respond as follows. First, not all workers are xenophobic in my sampling. My research also look at workers who have positive and neutral attitudes towards labour migrants living in working-class neighbourhoods. Second, this everyday xenophobia or ethno-nationalism arises from inequality structures and can therefore be explained by habitus, which allows workers to navigate inequalities in everyday life. I would argue that this xenophobia or ethno-nationalism is generated by the political regime; it is caused by the poor quality of life and lack of working-class jobs in deindustrialising areas.

Finally, both sociologists raise questions about the concepts of everyday struggle and resistance that I theorise and develop further, drawing on ethnography of Russia’s workers and a wider group of ordinary people. Morrison asks whether the proposed notion of ‘struggle without class’ is a more sophisticated tool for challenging models of organisational stuggle similar to those in the West, or whether it is closer to the accounts of informality and survival strategies. Altamura claims that my critique of the ‘passive workers’ argument puts me in the position of overestimating workers’ struggle and resistance, which do not allow them to change the established order of power.

These are very good questions that move the debate about workers forward. First of all, I do not claim that the struggle of workers in today’s Russia is classless. Rather, I argue that this struggle is class-based and rooted in the changing social structure of Russian society, where classes are in the process of forming. According to my approach, everyday struggle, as a set of practical activities aimed at improving life from the bottom up, is activated by configurations of senses and imaginaries, both of which have class at their core. But this class is more affective and different from what can be seen, for example, in Western European societies with more stable social structures. In this sense, my notion of everyday struggle tends to challenge ‘Western’ understandings of institutional labour struggle and invites social scholars to broaden their understanding of struggle that takes place at both institutional and everyday levels.

As for the comment about the overestimation of workers’ struggle and the impossibility of resistance to change the status quo, I would say that this is a subject for further research. My book aimed to deconstruct the stereotypes of the ‘patient Russian workers’. The next step is to understand the short- and long-term effects of everyday struggles in Russia and beyond.

You can also read my answers to Mitja Stefancic’s questions about the book and class formation in Russian society (in Serbian or with Google translate) at Zofijini Ljubimci’s website.

ORDER BOOK

The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: dissemination and reception

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

Unbelievable, ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’ is now six month old! At its six-month mark, I would like to reflect on its dissemination and initial reception. 

This is an academic book. So it is not surprising that the first feedback and comments I received were from my colleagues in universities around the world. What surprised me, however, was that historians, including the historians of Russia and labour movements in other countries, appeared to be so grateful readers! 

Some of them wrote to me to say that they were interested in reading the book and found it valuable. At the same time, some of them pointed out that such title should cost less and that the high price prevents a wider audience from reading it. I absolutely agree! But the publisher sets the price. If enough copies are sold, Manchester University Press will reprint the book in softcover. So thinking about dissemination is important here.

I have also received messages from friends and colleagues with congratulations saying that they liked the book cover. Needless to say, I like it too. I chose the image for the front cover deliberately. I was lucky that my publisher provided me with a designer who came up with a really great cover. I am glad that the readers find it cool and hot at once.

‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’ tells the story of workers living in specific geographical locations, in post-industrial cities. So it seemed to be of interest to human geographers and urban scholars. Sociologist Anna Zhelnina invited me to talk about my book on one episode of the New Books Network. It was a very pleasant conversation, which helped me to talk about the book from different angles. We discussed the local atmosphere in Russia’s deindustrialising neighbourhoods, the involvement of residents in grassroots activities, social and labour movements, and, among other things, my research methodology, alternative approach to writing and theoretical contribution.

I really enjoy research blogging. So I have written a number of guest posts about the book. First, Manchester University Press republished my blog about subbotnik, proletarian art and the urban life of workers. Then, I wrote about how working-class communities experience deindustrialisation in Russia for the blog of the international project ‘Deindustrialization and the Politics of Our Time’ (DéPOT at Concordia University). Finally, I contributed to the blog of the Raymond Williams Society with a post on structure of feeling as a conceptual tool in the study of everyday life and struggle.

I am grateful to my colleagues for inviting me to present the book at the regular seminar of the Bourdieu, Work and Inequality research network and at the seminar for history students at Sorbonne Université. 

I also presented some chapters of the book at the British Sociological Association annual conference 2024 ‘Crisis, Continuity and Change’ and at the DéPOT project annual conference ‘Gender, Family and Deindustrialization’. 

These dissemination efforts has resulted in ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’ being included in the book review lists of the following journals, magazines and blogs (that I am aware of): 

·      The BSA Network Magazine

·      LSE Review of Books

·      Europe-Asia Studies

·      Eurasian Geography and Economics

·      Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism 

·      Laboratorium: Russia Review of Social Research 

If you would like to get a free copy, please contact one of the issues listed above to write a review. 

Last but not least. I would like to thank all the people who ordered my book for their libraries! ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’ is now available in the library catalogues of the following universities:

·      University of Helsinki

·      University College London

·      University of Sussex

·      Aarhus University

·      Sorbonne University

·      Manchester Metropolitan University

·      University of Cambridge 

I guess this list is longer. 

ORDER BOOK

What next? I see the interest in my book in French-speaking countries, especially in France and Canada. It would be great to have it translated into French and other languages. If anyone from a non-English publisher reads this post and is interested in translating my book into another language, please contact Manchester University Press. 

And for me, it’s time to think about how else I can tell the stories of workers’ urban lives. 

Stay tuned!

On the front cover image of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ 1 Comment

On the background of hot debates about Russia, I got the final version of the front cover of my forthcoming book to be released just in four months, on 16 January 2024. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography, The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle creatively explores the lived experiences of working-class and wider deindustrialising communities in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg, and beyond.

In this blog post, I would like to discuss the visual aesthetics of the book mainly focusing on its front cover image. It contains some elements of the poster The 1st of May. The All-Russian subbotnik created by graphic artist Dmitrii Moor (Orlov) in 1920. A brief overview of his life will help to explain better his artistic approach. Moor was born in the family of an engineer in Novocherkassk in 1883. After moving to Moscow in 1989, he got a vocational education and participated in the Revolution of 1905. This experience made him realise that he should present the voice of working-class people through the artistic means (see Kozlov, 1949). Moor did not have a formal art education, but inside the country, he was considered to be a People’s Artist, while his art was called ‘proletarian art’. To the international audience, Moor may be known for his avant-garde posters and political caricatures.

The photo of the poster The 1st of May. The-All Russian subbotnik by Dmitrii Moor (Orlov) taken by Alexandrina Vanke in the Lenin Library

In The 1st of May, Moor depicted working-class people on May Day engaged in building and maintaining not only the industrial urban infrastructure but also the fabric of everyday life. This visual representation of workers as acting aligns with my main argument about workers’ engagement in the creative forms of mundane resistance which, as I explain in the book, falls under the category of everyday struggle.

For the greater effect, Moor used a combination of black, beige and red colours which characterise his graphic art style. The message of his image is clear and concise. The poster realistically shows the urban life of workers and emphasises their class consciousness: the themes my book explores in detail. In the background, one can see the industrial urban landscape with the train, some factories and power lines telling us about industrialisation and electrification in the early-Soviet era. There are two inscriptions on the top reading ‘Russian Socialist Federation of the Soviet Republic’ and ‘Workers Of All Countries Unite!’ (see also). There is the capitalised poster title at the bottom.

In his poster, Moor glorifies subbotnik – the word derived from subbota meaning Saturday – which is a voluntary collective activity of cleaning and maintaining the urban infrastructure or the workplace emerged right after the October Revolution. Subbotniks usually took place on days off around Vladimir Lenin’s birthday on 22 April. Very quickly from a volunteer activity they turned to be free labour of Soviet people. Emerged in the early-Soviet era, subbotnik as a practice survived the dissolution of the USSR and has gained new meanings in contemporary Russia. In Chapter 7, I analyse top-down and grassroots subbotniks organised in one industrial neighbourhood where I did ethnography.

I especially enjoy that Moor’s image shows not only the strength of working-class men but also working-class women. Chapter 3 of my book considers power relations in deindsutrialising communities mediated by the intersections of class, gender, age and ethnicity/race.

Before I started writing the book, I thought that Moor’s image may be good for the front cover. To obtain this image in high resolution, I went to the Lenin Library in Moscow, ordered it from the archive and photographed it. As far as another poster was glued on the backside of The 1st May from the library’s collection, some of the bleedthrough from it are visible in my photo.

The image by Dmitrii Moor (Orlov) used for Autumn/ Winter 2023 catalogue of Manchester University Press

At the stage of book production, I suggested the publisher to use my photo of Moor’s poster for the front cover. It was so exciting to see that Manchester University Press put this image on the front cover of their Autumn/ Winter 2023 catalogue.

The MUP designer created several front covers for my book differed by the title fonts and colour shades. I am very glad that in its final version, Moor’s avant-garde image from The 1st of May aesthetically resonates with the title font of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia.

The final front cover of my book

You can find the book details and recommend it to your library on the website of Manchester University Press. The book is also available to pre-order via the following booksellers.

Research article on everyday inequalities and images of society

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

My new article Researching Lay Perceptions of Inequality through Images of Society: Compliance, Inversion and Subversion of Power Hierarchies has been published in Sociology journal.

Cite: Vanke, A. (2023). Researching Lay Perceptions of Inequality through Images of Society: Compliance, Inversion and Subversion of Power Hierarchies. Sociology, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385231194867

The article enhances our understanding of affective and imaginative power of social class by focusing on ordinary people’s lay perceptions of inequality in the example of Russia. I draw a special attention to the social imaginary by which I mean people’s capacity to evoke images in imagination and produce alternative visions of the future. This understanding follows from the conceptualisations of imaginary by Cornelius Castoriadis, Raymond Williams and Karine Clément. The article also explores the moral and symbolic signifiers of class, as well as a sense of inequality and a sense of social justice being formed within socio-material urban infrastructures.

The article may be of interest of those who apply (or would like to learn how to apply) arts-based methods in qualitative and innovative research. It explains how to utilise the method of ‘drawing of society’ initially introduced by Alexander Bikbov in his cross-national study of pupils’ and students’ perceptions of inequality and social justice. In my research, I develop this arts-based method in a multi-sited ethnography of deindustrialising communities in two major post-industrial cities of Russia.

I integrated the method of a drawing of society in an ethnographic interview. During the interviews, I asked research participants to draw Russian society and then explain what they drew. My database includes 35 drawings of society. I complemented these data with observation in deindustrialising urban areas where my ethnography took place.

The article explains in detail how to analyse drawings of society with other multi-sensory data.

My empirical research has shown that the members of deindustrialising communities, including workers and professionals, tend to imagine Russian society as divided between a small number of the rich and a large number of the poor, and as consisting of morally signified social classes.

I support this argument with three examples of images of society created by my research participants.

First, the image of a pyramid of classes was the most popular in my dataset. These drawings demonstrate a top-down power dynamic in Russian society visualising clear divisions between social classes. They often express ordinary people’s compliance with the established social order.

Second, I analyse the images of society with social portraits of people belonging to different social classes or classed groups. One of them is a drawing of ironically inverted power hierarchy in which the rich appeared to be depicted at the bottom, while the poor at the top. Notably, the middle class is absent in this drawing.

Finally, I analyse the image of a class conflict created by one research participant with the radical imagination. In this drawing, Russian society is divided between the greedy capital holders and ordinary people sub-divided into the active working classes and sleeping ‘vegetables’. This image shows an accumulation of ‘power from below’ aimed to subvert or challenge power hierarchy.

I support this argument with more evidence and examples in one chapter of my forthcoming book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle, which is available to pre-order at the website of Manchester University Press or your preferred bookseller.

Applying creative ethnography in the study of deindustrialising neighbourhoods

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

I wrote a new blog post on creative ethnography in the study of everyday life in deindustrialising urban settings for SAGE Perspectives. It is based on my recent research article examining structures of feeling in Russia’s industrial neighbourhoods. You can read a full version of this blog here, if you are interested in knowing more about how to apply drawing and visual research methods in multi-sited ethnography .

Deindustrialisation is a global complex process. It leads not only to the closure of factories which would otherwise damage the environment but also negatively affects everyday life and job opportunities of working-class people. Deindustrialisation often goes hand in hand with neoliberal urban development resulting in gentrification and displacement of longstanding residents of former industrial neighbourhoods and council estates.  

Due to the multiple impacts of deindustrialisation on the lived experiences of local communities, it is important to develop multi-sensory approaches and innovative methodologies relevant for researching place attachment, sensual experiences and urban imaginaries of people residing in post-industrial urban areas.

Illustration by Alexandrina Vanke based on ethnographic data from her research

In my study of two industrial neighbourhoods with mixed social compositions in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg, Russia, I drew on the approach of multi-sited ethnography. Its research design built on a combination of the mainstream qualitative methods of interviewing, observation, participation and the creative method of drawing of the neighbourhoods studied made by research participants, also known as a mental mapping technique.

A mental map is a visualisation of the subjective perception of urban space by city dwellers. Kevin Lynch applied mental mapping in his study of the city images in the US. According to Lynch, each image of the city composed by many individual images, which share some similar visual patterns. In my research on Russia’s industrial neighbourhoods, I used mental mapping to explore structures of feeling as affective principles regulating sensual experiences, urban imaginaries and practical activities of local communities. Mental mapping was aimed to elicit how members of those communities sense and imagine their urban areas.

Continue reading in the SAGE Perspectives Blog.

Research article on structure of feeling

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

My new article Co-existing structures of feeling: Senses and imaginaries of industrial neighbourhoods is out in The Sociological Review. This post summarises its key points. This is a first publication from my doctoral project exploring working-class life and struggle in post-Soviet Russia, which I completed at the University of Manchester in 2021.

tsr-7026773185022708375-71-1-january-2023

In the article, I provide an empirically grounded theorisation of the concept of structure of feeling introduced by sociologist Raymond Williams. Williams defined structure of feeling differently in his works. According to one of his definitions, structure of feeling can be viewed as ‘the spirit of the age’ reflecting the collective cultural feelings of a period or an era. Williams’s another understanding of structure of feeling is related to the lived experiences of working-class communities which have a particular way of life.

While Williams applied structures of feeling mainly in regard to English literature and film, I suggest bringing this concept in sociology of space and place and urban anthropology. In the article, I extend structure of feeling, drawing on my multi-sited ethnography in two industrial neighbourhoods located in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg, Russia.

I conceptualise structure of feeling by focusing on its affective mechanisms regulating senses, imaginaries and practical activities of residents of the two neighbourhoods studied. This ethnographic conceptualisation of structure of feeling allows me to explain better everyday life and local atmospheres in the urban areas undergoing deindustrialisation. The article answers the question of how working-class and longstanding middle-class residents sense and imagine their neighbourhoods.

The article builds on rich multi-sensory data derived from my PhD project: 50 interview transcripts, more than 150 pages of field notes, more than 550 photographs and 43 drawings of the industrial neighbourhoods made by research participants. I show how to apply multi-sited ethnography in the study of the lived experiences of local communities in two locations. I also explain how to use a method of drawing, also known as a mental mapping technique, in research on structures of feeling and deindustrialisation.

© The image by artist Polina Nikitina based on my ethnographic data

My research has revealed that working-class and longstanding middle-class residents show an affective attachment to place informed by an industrial residual structure of feeling. An industrial structure of feeling comprises values of factory culture, communality and shared space, while an emergent structure of feeling is informed by values of neoliberal development, individual comfort and private space. Both neighbourhoods studied have its particular local atmosphere driven by complicated relationships between socialist/ Soviet / industrial and post-socialist/ post-Soviet/ post-industrial structures of feeling. That is why, I suggest understanding structure of feeling not as a spirit of the time but as a multiple spirit of the time and place.

I develop further this theorisation in my book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle to be published by Manchester University Press. Focusing on the issue of inequality, the book provides a novel account of urban life in post-industrial cities. One of its empirical chapters is partly based on this article.

You can find the article OnlineFirst on the website of The Sociological Review.

If you find the information from this post helpful and decide to use it in your publications, please cite:

Vanke, A. (2023). Co-existing structures of feeling: Senses and imaginaries of industrial neighbourhoods. The Sociological Review, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221149540