Tag: class studies

Paperback release incoming: what critics think about my book and why it matters for the class debate – Part 2

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

This is the second part of the blogpost with my response to the reviewers who engaged with ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia’ to be released in paperback in January 2026. In this part, I would like to discuss some comments on my book by Paupolina Gundarina and Mitja Stefancic.

In her essay ‘“Soviet in post-Soviet” in Alexandrina Vanke’s book The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle’, published in Russian on the Syg.ma platform, Paupolina Gundarina provides a very sensitive and careful reading of my book. She views my research as ‘an ambitious and creative ethnographic description of workers’ communities, which opens up new dimensions of (the working) class, creativity, imagination and phenomenology of home’. 

Gundarina finds my methodology, drawing on multi-sited ethnography, innovative and creative. She especially highlights the participatory nature of my study, when I invited research participants to draw their neighbourhood and society, which allowed me to grasp their ‘affective experience[s]’. As the reviewer stresses, this methodology opens up new opportunities for the debate about emotions regarding deindustrialisation and their relationships with the Soviet legacy and ‘the issues of morality, trauma, nostalgia, loss and adaptation’. 

‘[T]his is an ambitious and creative ethnographic description of workers’ communities, which opens up new dimensions of (the working) class, creativity, imagination and phenomenology of home.’ Paupolina Gundarina

Continuing this discussion, I would place my methodology within two developing strands. On the one hand, it is situated within the range of ethnographies paying particular attention to sensory-ness, affect and the imaginary. On the other hand, it develops creative, visual and arts-based methods. In my forthcoming article, I call this approach ‘avant-garde methodology’ which generates alternative interpretations of class experiences.

Gundarina finds my revision of class struggle, which I reconsider within the everyday realm, as an important contribution to the Marxist debate on class and resistance. As she writes, ‘Vanke’s book challenges economic determinism showing that the working class in post-Soviet Russia is defined through everyday practices, spatial belonging and grassroots resistance, not just through employment status’. She correctly reads my argument about the formation of classes in Russia’s major cities as ‘a constant, contradictory process, which is influenced by both the Soviet legacy and neoliberal change’. 

As Gundarina discusses further the ethnographic examples from my book, ordinary people continue to implement Soviet practices in deindustrialising urban spaces. But indeed, in the neoliberal context, these practices gain new meanings, allowing residents of industrial districts to cultivate class feelings and attachment to place, for example, through collective maintenance and decoration of the depleting infrastructure remaining from the Soviet era. According to my approach, these practical activities fall under the category of everyday struggle.  

I especially enjoy that the reviewer included her Russian translation of some research participants’ quotes from the book and provided her example of the controversial local debates around a DIY swan created by a local resident of Barnaul, a Western Siberian city of Russia, and put in a public place.

The book review by Mitja Stefancic, published in the 50th Anniversary Issue of Network, magazine by the British Sociological Association, continues to discuss my book in light of the class debate. As he writes, ‘One of the main achievements of the book lies in its successful attempt to re-discuss the concept of class’. Stefancic stresses the importance of my research as it ‘shows how class in Russia means something different when compared, for example, to Western societies’. This conversation about classes continued in an interview with me by Stefancic published in Serbian, English and Italian. I am very grateful for this opportunity to discuss my research outputs beyond academia. 

‘One of the main achievements of the book lies in its successful attempt to re-discuss the concept of class. In fact, on a theoretical level, Vanke effectively shows how class in Russia means something different when compared, for example, to Western societies.’ Mitja Stefancic

Indeed, unlike Western countries with stable social structures, Russia has experienced political upheavals and socio-economic reconfigurations of social groups during the 1990s, which influenced how people perceive classes and inequalities. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, a new social structure is being formed in contemporary Russia framed by the neoliberal neo-authoritarian order of power. 

My field research conducted before 2022 revealed polarisation in the social structure with a split between the poor and the rich, as I argue in the book and in my article on lay perceptions of inequality (read its summary on Everyday Society). However, sociologically it is interesting to understand how the Russia-Ukraine war will reconfigure the social structure and redistribute social wealth and capitals between particular segments of Russian society.

Stefancic concludes that my book helps to understand better Russian society itself and will be of interest to those who are focusing on how working classes around the globe overcome life difficulties while being excluded from big politics. In light of the global shift of the political mainstream to the right, as discussed in the August issue of Global Dialogue, my approach to everyday struggle in restrictive conditions has the potential to be transferred to other contexts. 

PRE-ORDER PAPERBACK

Paperback release incoming: what critics think about my book and why it matters for the class debate – Part 1

This is photo with the hardback copies of 'The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia' by Alexandrina Vanke
~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

I got a wonderful news from Manchester University Press about The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia. It will be out in paperback in January 2026. This means that the book will be available at a more affordable price soon. As recent reviews show, since its first edition in January 2024, the book remains highly relevant, widening discussion about the working classes, deindustrialisation, inequalities and everyday struggles.

In one of the previous blog posts, I replied to the first book reviews by sociologists Claudio Morrison and Christopher Altamura. In this blog post, I would like to continue this conversation about class with other commentators on the book, which appeared in the first half of 2025. I will engage with them in the chronological order in which their reviews were published.

In Challenging Stereotypes of Post-Soviet Russian Workers (CEU Review of Books), Victoria Kobzeva from the University of Birmingham provides critical comments on my theoretical framework, researcher positionality and interpretations of workers’ acts of everyday resistance. On the one hand, Kobzeva writes that the book introduces ‘a dozen concepts’ that are pivotal for my further ethnographic interpretations. On the other hand, she claims that my theoretical contribution to social theory, especially to Pierre Bourdieu’s approach of habitus, ‘feels limited’ despite rich empirical data.

‘Vanke’s book is an example of immersive, prolonged ethnography enriched by creative methodologies and a deep engagement with the lived experiences of Russia’s urban working class.’ Viktoria Kobzeva

When an author meets such criticism, it leads to reflection on what theoretical contribution means and how to increase it in future publications. Below, I would like to address this point of criticism.

The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia develops some theoretical concepts further. The book engages with ‘structure of feeling’, introduced by Raymond Williams, which I re-conceptualise as an affective principle regulating senses, imaginaries and practical activities within socio-material infrastructures, drawing on multi-sited ethnography in post-socialist deindustrialising contexts. The book also conceptualises everyday struggle, by which I mean a set of multiple counter-hegemonic acts, micro-practices and activities performed by workers and ordinary people in everyday life. I agree with Kobzeva that everyday struggle needs to be theorised further, as this concept differs from mundane resistance, introduced by James Scott, even though it encompasses resistance. However, I see working with everyday struggle as my contribution to theories of struggle and protest, which mainly focus on overt protests and social movements in Western liberal democracies.

Next, in the book, I map these and other concepts, visualising relationships between them in two theoretical sketches, and synthesise them into a theory of urban life and everyday struggle. I am still thinking about what this theory could be called: multi-sensory, affective or imaginative? The idea of everyday struggle embedded in life leaves room for reconsidering the concept of habitus, through re-viewing it as a set of dispositions of resistance and counter-actions.

The suggested framework adds affective, sensory and imaginative dimensions to the understanding of class and struggle that, as my ethnography shows, goes beyond coping and resistance. This framework opens up an opportunity to think about social change at the micro-level, enacted through enduring dispositions of co-creation and re-shaping. In the book, I also deal with the concept of spatialised gender habitus, or a gendered sense of place. I agree with the reviewer that it needs to be developed further, probably in future publications.

In the book, I do not introduce new concepts. What I do is theorise and synthesise existing concepts based on extensive multi-sited ethnography in Russia’s post-industrial cities. If such a framework contributes to the de-stigmatisation of low-resourced groups in post-socialist settings and can potentially be discussed and adopted (with adjustments) in other ‘local’ contexts, then my goal as an author will have been met.

However, there is still an open question about whether everyday struggle is exclusively working-class, and whether it allows class consciousness, as was asked in the review by Morrison. My continuing ethnography shows that not only working-class people engage in everyday struggle, but that it is still informed by how people sense inequality locally, imagine social justice in society and view the global future.

‘The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in Everyday Struggle (published by Manchester University Press in 2024) by Alexandrina Vanke is an innovative and textured engagement with the world of the working class in the post-industrial cities of Russia.’ Arpita Rachel Abraham

The book review by Arpita Rachel Abraham, an Urban Fellow at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bengaluru, published on the Doing Sociology platform, continues the discussion about class consciousness, urban change, critical sociological theory and ethnography from the perspective of the impact of ‘global political developments’ and ‘Russia’s aggression on Ukraine’ on the working classes and ordinary people. Abraham stresses that my book advances the theory of the everyday, which is often lacking a political dimension. She points out that my research shows that the political is part of everyday life in neoliberal neo-authoritarian contexts. In this sense, my book bridges two separate areas: everyday life studies and social movement studies.

Praising ‘an impressive assemblage of textual, visual and performative elements’ in the book, Abraham raises a critical question about the one-dimensionality and repetitiveness of the argument regarding workers’ active engagement in everyday struggle. I would like to explain that the idea behind writing this book was to make this core argument part of academic storytelling, using it as the key element that would sew all chapters together like a needle. In the next book, I will probably experiment with integrating more authorial ideas and less polished arguments, which I will present not as analytically justified statements but as diverse interpretations, provoking new directions, debates and conversations on the subject matter.

I am grateful to both Victoria Kobzeva and Arpita Rachel Abraham for their interest in my book and for writing reviews that widen the discussion about the issues considered in The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia.

In the second part of this blog post, I will reflect on the comments from the reviews of my book by Paupolina Gundarin and Mitja Stefancic.

To be continued…

On the poetics of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ 2 Comments

The recent news about the outbreak of the Israel-Palestine war and the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and the Armenia-Azerbaijan war makes me really sad. This news put me back to the reflection on how social scholars should write in the age of multiplication of conflicts, crises and catastrophes.

I finish The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia – to be out just in three months – with the suggestion to invent alternative genres of writing about social reality, society and ordinary people who suffer most from wars, crises and catastrophes. My book ends with a ready-made: ‘Toward the bright future of emergent genres!’ A ready-made is an avant-garde piece of text or art made of already existing objects, images or phrases, etc. which gain new meanings being placed into a new context (read more here).

The final sentence of my book starts with the phrase usually associated with Vladimir Lenin’s slogan ‘Toward the bright future’. On the one hand, it refers to the residualised form of expression, while the residual is always alternative to the dominant, according to Raymond Williams.On the other hand, it performatively calls for novatory action aimed to engage the creativity and imagination of a reader. Thus, it produces the possibility or hope for the emergence of genres different from the dominant ones.

When it is hard to express feelings and thoughts with prose, especially in the ages of wars and catastrophes, people often resort to poetry building on the symbolic, imaginative and rhythmic use of language. At this point, the reader may wonder what poetical can be about the book written in the genre of academic non-fiction.

While writing the book, I integrated some poetic forms in my discursive strategy aimed to represent workers alternatively to their negative, stigmatising representations reproduced in the mainstream academic and media discourses. The avant-garde poetry of the 1920s and the romantic poetry of the late 18th century inspired my academic non-fiction. Below, I shed light on the poetics of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia.

The book opens with my ready-made poem signed with ‘the author’:

What is the Future?

The possibilities for new forms.

Make SOCIETY better NOW!

– A ready-made poem by the author

This poem invites the reader to think about the meaning of the future and calls for action to make society better right now, at least at the level of everyday life. The poem also explains that the future can be viewed as the possibility for new forms of living, creating, writing, etc. The use of three different punctuation marks and upper and lower cases in the three-line poem helps me keep it rhythmic, performative and concise.

My ready-made poem about the future in the visual format © Alexandrina Vanke

I crafted this poem out of booklet and magazine clippings. I cut sentences out first and then glued them on the notepad page already filled with my handwritten notes about ready-made (found) poetry as arts-based research method.

Another example of how I used poetry in academic non-fiction is citing a poem by futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. I included his All hail to subbotniki! in the book to illustrate the meanings of subbotnik, a collective clean of the neighbourhood or the workplace in a day off. (You can read more about this practice here). As far as I did not find an English translation of this poem written in Russian, I translated some of its parts for Chapter 7 covering the theme of the creative forms of everyday resistance.

All hail to subbotniki!

1. Hey, comrades, railway man

and water-transport worker!

2. Remember,

each honest worker

should go to subbotnik! […]

8. All move to subbotnik,

9. and the road will be fixed,

cleaned

and cleared.

Rosta No. 611. November 1920

The poem written in the avant-garde genre one hundred years ago performs several functions in my academic non-fiction about contemporaneity. It provides the reader with the example of the ideological meaning of early-Soviet subbotnik and helps me to show how the meaning of this practice evolved by the 2020s. Apart from this, Mayakovsky’s poem exemplifies performativity calling for action in the avant-garde poetic form which partly inspires (but not pre-determines) my discursive strategy. In this case, the poem by another author illustrates my ethnographic writting about a particular research theme.

The poem All hail to subbotniki! by Maykovsky (on the right-hand side) and his another visual poem (on the left-hand side) taken from the online database of the Russian State Library

The final example which I would like to give is about integration of poetic forms in the skeleton of academic non-fiction. One of the reasons why you may like or not like The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is that the romantic poetry inspired its table of contents and framed its structural composition. The book consists of three parts, Part I: Theoretical sketches, Part Il: Ways of life and Part III: Ways of struggle, which reminiscent of the titles of poetry collections by William Blake, Poetical Sketches (1783) and two parts of his Songs of Innocence and Experience: Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience (1789–1794).

You may ask: ‘What is William Blake doing in non-fiction about Russia’s workers?’ First of all, I integrated some elements of Blake’s poetry because the romantic poets made a discursive revolution in English literature breaking with the Shakespearian tradition without denying it. One can criticise Blake for being ‘mystic’, the Lake Poets for being ‘arrogant’ and the romantic poetesses for being too focused on their feelings, but their forms of expression helped me figure out my writing strategy about workers aimed not to romanticise them but represent them as they are through the alternative (to the dominant) stylistic means.

If you would like to know more about how these poetic genres allowed me to convey the dominant feelings of the age and creatively tell the story about working-class people, you can pre-order The urbanl life of workers in post-Soviet Russia via your University library or recommend it to your librarian.

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

How can I tell what social class I belong in?

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

My post on social class for TheQuestion UK.

The answer this question depends on several parameters. Firstly, it depends on the way you define classes or social groups. Secondly, it depends on the social structure of the society you are a part of. Thirdly, it depends on your class consciousness or your subjective class self-identification. I’ll outline four main sociological approaches to social classes here.

1) In Marxist theory, classes are understood as large groups of people differing in their positions regarding the ownership of the means of production and social division of labour. In other words, a class position is determined by the role of an individual in the public organization of labour. Marx divides the capitalist society of the 18th century into three classes:

  • Bourgeoisie, which is a dominant class owning the means of production and feeding on the exploitation of wage-workers;
  • Petite bourgeoisie, which is a class of small owners living on their personal (mostly family) labour (e.g. craftsmen, substantial peasants, etc.);
  • Workers who make up a class of employees without the means of production, who sell their labour power, producing surplus value and being exploited by bourgeoisie in the process.

In Marxism, class position forms class consciousness. But since the 18th century, the concept of class has changed significantly and new social classifications have been invented.

2) In the latter half of the 20th century, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu built on the Marxist concepts of class and capital. According to Bourdieu, social class should be understood as a collective position in the multi-dimensional space of social distinctions, which is a configuration of various volumes of capitals:

  • Economic capital (money, valuable material objects),
  • Cultural capital (level of education, specific knowledge, diplomas),
  • Social capital (connections, social networks),
  • Symbolic capital (recognition).

In Bourdieu’s approach, social classes look like clusters of points. It means that individuals with the same social characteristics and the same volumes of capitals cluster together in social space and have similar “class habituses.” “Class habitus” refers to an incorporated history and a set of social practices (manners, styles of behavior, etc.) that are determined by both the general of society and the biography of the individual.

To understand Bourdieu’s vision of classes, you can the graph from his book “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste”:

3) British sociologist John Goldthorpe suggested yet another class model centered on employment status. He distinguishes three main classes differing by type of labour contract:

  • Employers who buy labour forces and control workers;
  • Employees who sell their labour power to employers;
  • Self-employed who are relatively independent and work for themselves (e.g., businessmen, freelancers, etc.).

With R. Erikson and L. Portocarrero, Goldthorpe has elaborated an eleven-class scheme (EGP) containing several service classes, working classes and transitory classes. (See more about EGP here). Today, the EGP class scheme is widely used by sociologists in research on social stratification, social mobility, and social inequality.

4) In recent research on social structure in British society, a group of enthusiastic sociologists under the leadership of Mike Savage constructed a new classification of classes, building on Bourdieu’s approach of capitals. On the basis of vast empirical data Savage and colleagues have defined seven classes in contemporary British society, each involving specific social traits:

  • Elite: very high economic capital (especially savings), high social capital, very high highbrow cultural capital;
  • Established middle class: high economic capital, high status of mean contacts, high highbrow and emerging cultural capital;
  • Technical middle class: high economic capital, very high mean social contacts, but relatively few contacts reported, moderate cultural capital;
  • New affluent workers: moderately good economic capital, moderately poor mean score of social contacts, though high range, moderate highbrow but good emerging cultural capital;
  • Traditional working class: moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable house price, few social contacts, low highbrow and emerging cultural capital;
  • Emergent service workers: moderately poor economic capital, though with reasonable household income, moderate social contacts, high emerging (but low highbrow) cultural capital;
  • Precariat: poor economic capital, and the lowest scores on every other criterion.

If you would like to know which class you belong in according to the classification developed by Mike Savage and his team, just take the test “The Great British class calculator: What class are you?”

But beware! Do not forget that this test is designed for respondents from Great Britain. Other societies might have other class structures, or the social classes in those societies might involve a different set of social traits 🙂