Applying creative ethnography in the study of deindustrialising neighbourhoods

06.03.202306.03.2023 ~ 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

06.02.202304.03.2023 ~ 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.

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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

Lakeland and its Poets. Visiting Lodore Falls and the town of Keswick

10.01.202210.01.2022 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

‘How does the water
Come down at Lodore?’
My little boy asked me
Thus, once on a time;
And moreover he tasked me
To tell him in rhyme.

Robert Southey, The Cataract of Lodore, 1820

Having a genuine interest in English Romantic poetry, one December weekend, I decided to go to the town of Keswick (pronounced as [‘kesik] or [‘kezik]) located in the Lake District, Cumbria. My choice of destination was motivated by the fact that the poets Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey lived there at the beginning of the 19^th century and where their friend William Wordsworth, a famous poet, visited them.

Below, I will reflect on the visual landscape of the area and nature as a public good. Finally, I will consider critically the issue of taste as defined by the Lake Poets[1]. Altogether, this reflection should explain the social, cultural and economic divisions that I found in Keswick and its surroundings.

The visual landscape of Lakeland

The Lake District, also known as the Lakes and Lakeland, is a national park of North West England. I had a chance to see its northern part with the town of Keswick situated along the northeast shore of Derwentwater lake and surrounded by picturesque hills and mountains, scary caves and magnificent waterfalls.

Alfred Wainwright, a British cartographer and illustrator, dedicated 13 years of his life to exploring the landscape of the area and created seven volumes of A Pictorial Guide to the Lakeland Fells published between 1955 and 1966. Through fine detailing, Wainwright’s illustrations and maps depict not only the fells and paths of Lakeland but also the enigma of nature and its magnetism.

The cover of Volume One of Lakeland Mountain Drawings by Alfred Wainwright

My perception of Lakeland was conditioned by the fact that it was my first visit to that area. I was impressed by the beauty of unusual colours of nature which I have not seen anywhere in the UK. The mountains of orange, green and brown with white snowcaps; the azure sky with lenticular clouds of white and grey shades reflecting in the surface of Derwentwater; black-and-white sheep feeding in the green meadows; trees and shrubs of marsh, sand and black; and pearl-white waterfalls altogether made up the palette of Lakeland in winter.

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Stick out your tongue at your mother tongue. Or how I visited Shakespeare’s town Stratford-upon-Avon

14.12.202114.12.2021 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

One December weekend before Christmas, I decided to visit Stratford-upon-Avon, the hometown of English poet and writer William Shakespeare. I went there with the Manchester International Society organising cultural events and bus trips across the UK for students and members of the university community.

Whilst the bus was carrying us from Northern England to Midlands, I had a very nice chat with a female master student from China who came to Manchester to study intercultural communication. We shared a common interest in Lake poetry and experienced similar problems of using English English, as far as we were native speakers of Russian and Chinese languages.

For the first time, I leant that British English should be called English English from my main supervisor who explained to me how to use it in my thesis properly. Not ‘practice’ but ‘practise’, not ‘garbage’ but ‘rubbish’, not ‘while’ but ‘whilst’, etc.

My acquaintance, a master student, told me that there was a hierarchy of English languages. For example, British English and American English take higher positions within the hierarchy of languages compared to Australian and Canadian variants, whilst Asian and Chinese English-es take the lowest positions because of the sounds and pronunciations that are typical for those groups of languages.

Meanwhile, our bus reached the green fields of Warwickshire and I saw a couple of road signs reading ‘Shakespeare’s town’ and ‘London’. Once the bus dropped us off in Stratford-upon-Avon, we noticed that the car parking was very busy. Crowds of people, including us, were going towards the Victorian Christmas Fayre taking place in the town centre.

The Fayre stalls located along the main streets near the river Avon were full of Christmas gifts, decorations, hand-crafted goods, candles and illuminations. The smell of fried potatoes, mulled wine and other tasty food mixed with the Christmas spirit was in the air. People were waiting in queues to grab something to eat or drink.

And Shakespeare as a linguistic sign looked at the crowded street from different corners and through the windows of pubs, shops and half-timbered houses. One could see his images on hotel signs, hoodies, mugs, copybooks and souvenirs. We followed Henley Street and came across William Shakespeare’s statue that was surrounded by people visiting the Christmas Fayre.

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Welsh sketches. From Aberystwyth with love

26.11.202130.11.2021 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

Aberystwyth is a coastal university town in Ceredigion county of West Wales. If you decide to go there, please do not forget to bring a bit of cultural curiosity and a sense of humour with you. Be ready to meet nice locals there: witches, ghosts, deities, fiends, druids and courageous detectives investigating mysterious crimes. Louie Knight is one of them. He is the best private detective in the town and the main character of the Aberystwyth noir novels by British writer Malcolm Pryce.

In the fifth book of the series, Louie deals with the long-time disappearance of Ninochka, a daughter of Uncle Vanya, a Soviet museum worker from Ukrainian Hughesovka where Ninochka was possessed by the spirit of a dead Welsh girl named Gethsemane Walters. Uncle Vanya, or the man who introduced himself in that way, came to Aberystwyth to ask Louis and his business partner Calamity for help in search of Ninochka. As a fee, uncle Vanya suggested a very valuable sock worn by Yuri Gagarin during his first flight into space.

‘What a story!’ you may say. And you will be right. The Aberystwyth noir novels nicely convey the atmosphere of the town. They can be a good start for learning about its weather, places and legends.

Once you are in the town, go to the Pier from where a beautiful view of the promenade and the Constitution Hill is revealed. The sounds of the blowing wind and crashing waves may combine with the songs of starlings and cries of seagulls there. In evenings, if the weather is clear, wonderful sunsets can be seen from the seafront.

In late November, when I happened to be in Aberystwyth, the weather was mild and changeable. Sometimes it was sunny, sometimes rainy, sometimes cloudy, sometimes windy, but always welcoming.

Rain or shine, people walk along the Prom edged by colourful buildings of the student dorms, hotels, pubs, cafés and small workshops. Once you get to the northern end of the Prom, kick the bar. ‘Kick the Bar’ is a local ritual of kicking the railings performed by students to attract love. However, nowadays not only students but also town dwellers of different ages kick the bar as tradition says.

From the northern end of the Prom, you can easily get to the top of the Constitution Hill either by following a winding path surrounded by small shrubs or by using the Aberystwyth Cliff Railway. Students enjoy going up Consti, as they call the Hill lovingly, and observing picturesque sunsets in evenings and looking at stars shining at nights from the top. One sunny morning after the rain, I was enjoying coffee with the fresh air and the gorgeous view of the bay in the Consti café on the top of the hill. Time stopped and it was nice just to live the moment.

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Surviving the 3rd Year of the PhD: Or, How to Become a ‘Structure of Feeling’ Part 2

16.06.202007.07.2021 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ 2 Comments

This is Part 2 of the post about my experience of writing PhD at the University of Manchester. You can read Part 1 here.

In the mid of January 2020, when I was coming back from Moscow to Manchester, some people in Europe already knew about the coronavirus from the news. However, most of them neither worried about it nor took it seriously. As for me, I was in reading research literature for my next empirical chapter.

Spring Semester: Stay Safe, Take Care and Write Thesis

Got back from winter break, I started writing chapter 5 on living life in two industrial neighbourhoods, where I undertook ethnography. In the chapter, I tried to explain the peculiarities of the spatial imaginary of Russian workers and other neighbourhoods’ residents with the help of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘a sense of place’ and Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘structure of feeling’. It took me three weeks to draft that chapter. Later, I spent three weeks more to improve it for the annual review 2020.

In February, most people from my network still did not worry about COVID-19, apart from my friend, a PhD student from China, who told me the news about the coronavirus, when I came back to the office. In the mid of February, I received feedback from my supervisory team. And then a new UCU strike began at 74 Universities across the UK. The strike lasted until March. Needless to say that striking was a very emotional (and emotionally tiring) experience. I presented my PhD research at the Sociology teach-outs. At the same time, I was mainly focused on writing the thesis. However, even a brief experience of taking part in collective actions was intellectually insightful for me and helped me to formulate my critical arguments.

Sociology teach-outs during the UCU strike, the University of Manchester Students’ Union, February 2020 © Photo by the author

In chapter 4 on my research approach and methodology, I criticized those scholars who studied a working-class movement in Russia in the 1990s and argued that Russian workers were ‘patient’ (for example, see: Ashwin, 1999), capable only for survival and not for proactive actions. After the UCU strikes, it became clear for me that those scholars looked at Russian workers from the ‘Western’ perspective of strong trade unions with a long-standing history. While in Russia, independent trade unions began to emerge at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. However, in Russia workers were involved in everyday struggle of different forms ranging from everyday resistance to open protests (and it also happened in the Soviet era (for example, see: Piskunov, 2017)). Probably, I will move this critique to chapter 3 about the Russian context which was written as a literature review for the annual review 2018. I spent three weeks for drafting chapter 4 and sent it to my supervisors in the mid of March. In a week, a lockdown happened in the UK.

Life under Lockdown: Stay Home, Save Lives

It is really hard to describe my experience of living life under lockdown. Talking to friends and colleagues from the academic community via Zoom, Skype, Facebook and other messengers, I realized that University people employed three strategies of coping with lockdowns in different parts of the globe. Some academics said that they ‘just ignore it’ meaning that they did not worry about the news and death toll and continued working as usual. Some others tried dealing with their worries work-wise. The rest (and it was my case) could not be focused on work at all.

My window view, March 2020 © Photo by the author

In the first weeks of lockdown, I was very stressed and could not write the next chapter supposed to be about the theoretical framework. I tried making myself to read books on theory, which I found at home. Fortunately, I borrowed some of them from the University library before its closure due to COVID-19. However, it was hard to be focused even on reading. I worried about my family and beloved ones in Russia. Also, all flights between countries were stopped. And there were some delays in delivering food at the beginning of the UK lockdown if you buy it online. These altogether added more stress. I had a feeling that I had to survive, even though it was not true. I am aware that there are a lot of people who suffered much more than me. In my case, it was more about emotional survival.

I felt that my emotional resource was close to run out and I sought professional assistance from the therapist who helped me to cope with anxiety. I was in contact with my relatives and friends, and my supervisory team was very supportive at that time. In the mid of April, I came back to writing and managed to draft theoretical chapter 2, which of course still needs to be improved. While I stayed at home, I tried to pay attention to my body, soul and health. It may sound very Foucauldian. Anyway, I established a daily routine: waking up at 6.30 am and going to bed at 10 pm, doing yoga, cooking healthy food and going out to the courtyard to breath fresh air. I aired out the rooms regularly and kept them clean. Having one walk a day near the house building I got to know my neighbours better.

A neighbour’s cat in their one walk a day, April 2020 © Photo by the author

At the same time, staying at home was a cultural experience for me. Here, I do not romanticize lockdown at all. In March, I subscribed to webpages of the museums, art galleries, theatres, and philharmonics opened online access to their cultural resources. Their wonderful streams helped me to cope with anxiety. I am very thankful to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Wiener Staatsoper, the Belvedere Museum Vienna, and many others for broadcasting their cultural events.

During lockdown, I finished reading The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante, the final book of the Neapolitan quartet, a series of novels telling the story of a friendship between two women who grew up in a working-class neighbourhood on the edge of Naples and had absolutely different life trajectories. The Neapolitan quartet gets the reader involved in a complicated relationship between two women and their relationships with other people of different backgrounds from their neighbourhood and other parts of Italy. It has your attention from the beginning to the end. I thought that I might borrow some literary forms from Ferrante’s novel and use them in my thesis. But then I realized that I need my ethnographic style.

Returning to the question about a ‘structure of feeling’

In the 3^rd year, I was too focused on my doctoral research. To take my mind off it, I bought water-mixable oil paints and started painting whatever I saw around in Manchester and its surroundings. I never painted before and viewed this activity only as a hobby. Staying at home for a long time I painted my window view representing structures of feeling of Northern England. That’s how I tried to reflect in visual arts what structure of feeling was. One of my friends said that structure of feeling was ‘that historical atmosphere of being that can’t fully be explored retroactively’. In this piece of text, I tried to grasp that historical atmosphere, in which I have been writing my PhD.

Surviving the 3rd Year of the PhD: Or, How to Become a ‘Structure of Feeling’ Part 1

15.06.202016.06.2020 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ 1 Comment

After two months of the coronavirus lockdown, Britain is slowly coming back to ‘normal’ life. In Manchester, cafés and non-essential shops reopen their doors to customers. People go out and gather together though social distancing, taking sanitary measures, and wearing facemasks. Meanwhile, I submitted my documents for the annual review 2020. It is time to look back over the 3^rd year of my PhD at the University of Manchester, full of intellectual insights but also of diverse feelings and experiences against the background of big events, which will go into history.

Autumn Semester: Eat, Pray, Love Write, Teach, Strike

The autumn semester started well and did not show any sign of trouble.

On the 1^st of September 2019, I was ready to begin writing the first, actually the final, empirical chapter of my thesis. I know it might sound strange but my supervisory team advised me to begin with that final chapter 7 looking at different forms of everyday struggle of workers and subordinate classes in Russia. I established a writing routine and spent two months for drafting the text. I was mainly struggling with how to formulate the arguments out of ethnographic data. For me, it turned out to be easy to write but hard to put rich ethnography in one chapter still waiting for a good summary.

Writing the first page of my thesis, September 2019 © Photo by the author

After that, I decided to follow a logical sequence in telling the story and spent the following two months for drafting the next, actually the previous, empirical chapter dedicated to everyday inequalities, which workers experienced daily in Russian industrial neighbourhoods. Chapter 6 on everyday inequalities and social imaginary was more consistent. I tried to inscribe theoretical concepts into the empirical analysis. However, building bridges between Russian data and ‘Western’ theories was not an easy task for me. Alongside this, I assisted my supervisor in her course on the everyday understanding of inequalities which broadened my knowledge in inequality studies.

The University Place, October 2019 © Photo by the author

The final lectures of the course were planned to be on how people protest inequalities and make sense of them. Due to the UCU* eight-day strike supported by 60 Universities across the UK, those lectures were cancelled. Instead, together with the University staff and students, we were protesting against unfair pensions in academia, gender and race pay gap, short-term contracts, underpayment and workload of early career researchers and graduate teaching assistants. In parallel to the strike, I was finishing chapter 6, while some of my peers were canvassing for the Labour Party before the General Elections.

The UCU strike at the University of Manchester, November 2019 © Photo by the author

I remember the day before the elections we were drinking in a pub with PhD students and somebody said that tomorrow we would wake up in socialism. The semester finished with the loss of Jeremy Corbin. Boris Johnson became the Prime Minister. For Britain, leaving the EU became an inevitable future. Many people in academia felt disappointed and thought that Brexit was the worst thing could happen. At that time, no one had ever heard about COVID-19.

Winter Break: Be Happy and Read Novels

Packing my suitcase with Christmas presents, I managed to squeeze a novel, which I borrowed from the university library and went to Russia. I was happy to spend a winter break in Moscow with my family, meet up with friends and colleagues, and visit a couple of art exhibitions.

During the Christmas holidays, I had more time for reading for pleasure. That’s how I turned to Border Country, the novel I brought with me in the suitcase. The novel opens with the return of Matthew Price, a university lecturer in London, to the Welsh village of Glynmawr, when his father, a signalman at the railway station, has a stroke. The book impressed me deeply by the imaginative depiction of the country, its landscapes and sceneries combining rural and industrial elements in the local infrastructure. After finishing it, I began to understand better what ‘structure of feeling’ meant.

The book from the University of Manchester Library © Photo by the author

Amazingly, the book from the library, the third impression of the novel published in 1978, contained the signature on its title page. I am still thinking whether it could be that I was holding in my hands the copy of the book signed by its author, Raymond Williams.

In the mid of January, when I was leaving Moscow for Manchester, some people in Europe already knew about the coronavirus from the news. However, most of them neither worried about it nor took it seriously. As for me, I was in reading research literature for my next empirical chapter.

To be continued…

*UCU is an abbreviation for the University and College Union, the official trade union supporting University workers across the UK.

Todmorden. A town with a scary name and social hierarchy

11.07.201912.06.2020 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ 3 Comments

Every year after passing our annual reviews, my University friends and I go on a trip to a town with a scary name of Todmorden. Todmorden is located in Northern England on the boundary between Yorkshire and Lancashire. If you split this name into two words, you will get ‘tod’ evoking associations with a German word ‘Tod’ meaning ‘death’ and ‘mor’ resembling a French word ‘mort’, which also means ‘death’. In other words, or playing with words you may easily get something like ‘deadly death’ or ‘death-death-something’. These associations make an aura of the place:D

Todmorden is full of legends about the origin of its name. One of the stories goes back to the 15^th century and tells of the Wars of the Roses. Without going into detail, I just say that bloody conflicts occurred between two rival groups of the English elite belonging to the dynasty of Plantagenet, the branch of Lancaster, having a red rose as its symbol, and the branch of York with a symbol of a white rose.

The Monument of the Roses, June 2018 © Photo by A. Vanke

Centuries passed, and today local cricket clubs use red and white roses as their emblems rivaling on the cricket pitch only. Now only the monument under the railway arc resembles the Wars of the Roses. However, there are no inscriptions on stone. It is quite hard to understand, whether stone roses refer to the past wars or the present sports competitions. I am guessing to both of them;)

The town and surroundings of Todmorden are also noteworthy by its industrial past and its farming present. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, this area was considered to be working-class because its residents mainly were employed in heavy industry and cotton mills located in the same place. However, after the 1970s most of the industry was dismissed that changed the local economy and life of the working-class community.

Now Todmorden is gentrified and has a mixed social composition. People belonging to different social classes live there. What is remarkable that this social hierarchy is visible in the landscape of the town and its surroundings. With friends, we enjoy walking in the countryside and hiking in the hills around Todmorden. Whenever we go up to the hills, I have a feeling that we move from the bottom to the top of the social hierarchy. If you have not stopped reading yet, I invite you to climb the hills together and see what can be found on the way.

At the bottom

In the valley, one can see a six-storey building of the Robinwood mill. This cotton mill was constructed at the beginning of the 19^th century. Its owners also built around some housing blocks for workers and more beautiful villas for managers. The mill building looks brutal and stable. It was made of stone bricks and reconstructed several times. The front of the building has some traces of a fire. Locals say that somebody set fire to the mill to make money, and now some parts of the building are for sale.

The Robinwood mill, July 2019 © Photo by A. Vanke

And what’s about housing? In the valley, one can find old well-built houses where mainly pensioners live and some social housing blocks for workers. Houses for pensioners (some of them belong to a local working-class community) are of low height with solid walls of stone brick, nice chimneys, double-glazed windows, through which one can see pot plants and house cats. There are small gardens with rosebushes in front of these houses. Sometimes the residents hang laundry outside.

Housing in the valley, June 2018 © Photo by A. Vanke

Relatively ‘new’ social housing resembles by its architecture typical council estates in England. It is two-storey housing blocks with flat and gable roofs, simple facades, and windows of different sizes. If you have a look at a window, you may see lace curtains and fresh flowers in vintage vases. Some residents put English cross flags on their windows with expressing their national identity and white-and-blue flags, which meaning I could hardly ever get. Life of people living in the valley seems to be hard.

Social housing at the bottom of the hill, July 2019 © Photo by A. Vanke

In the middle

Having looked around in the valley, we are going up to the hill. Several routes are leading to the top. Every time we explore a new route that allows us to know the local area better. The middle of the hill has picturesque views of the town with the cotton mill and small houses scattered in the valley. There are more trees and shadows here. At some point, you may realize that you are in the middle of nowhere. But soon you understand that the local middle class occupies this place on the hill.

This awareness comes, when you see another type of housing and small shiny cars of bright colours, red, yellow, white driving up and down the hill. I would say that houses in the middle are more diverse in design and style, but all of them have something in common. For example, middle-class houses are normally bigger than those we saw at the bottom. They may have more spacious yards and nicer gardens. If you come across local farms you will see that farmers usually have a piece of land near their houses.

This land needs to be cultivated by tractors. And we met one friendly tractor driver cultivating lands of different farmers. According to locals, the life of farmers is far from easy today. They produce meat, milk, cheese, eggs, and other foodstuffs, and sell them in the town market. While we were wandering around the farms, we met nice animals:) smiling horses, sleepy cows, lazy sheep, curious ostriches, beautiful deer, cute ponies, and funny buffalos. From the middle of the hill, life seems to be pastoral but still hardworking.

On the top

We keep on moving to the top. And what we find there? From the top of the hill, you will see picturesque panoramic views of the countryside with its beautiful fields, farms, other hills, and windmills. If you look more carefully you can notice villas hidden in the foliage of old trees. The villas are often surrounded by fences and sometimes by the barbed wire. Yes, exactly like this *Х*Х*Х* That’s why it is quite problematic to understand what is happening there because villas are hidden from the public eye in contrast to the houses in the middle and at the bottom of the hill. However, you will feel the atmosphere at the top of the local social hierarchy.

Villas on the top looks spacious and beautiful. Some of them resemble small castles surrounded by the piece of land which is not cultivated but used for the golf course or gardens. Some villas’ owners have greenhouses in their territories and decorate their yards with elegance and style. While we were going down, in one villa, I noticed a straw hat accurately laying on the garden armchair. In another one, a bonsai garden with accurately cut evergreens drew my attention. The people from the top of the hill drive Range Rover cars and keep dogs barking at passers-by.

I was thinking that life on the top might be aisé. However, barking dogs, fences and barbed wires were telling us that life was not easy there too.

Going down to earth

Our way back was much easier than to the top. When you are coming back you can see all types of houses in the distance. At that moment you may realize that social hierarchy exists and it is visible in the landscape. We were going down, down and down to earth, and finished our trip in the Golden Lion pub, a very popular local spot.

2nd year of the PhD: facing new challenges

30.06.201901.07.2019 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

Some people say that the 2^nd year is the most exciting and easiest stage of the full PhD process. On the one hand, I agree with this, because at this point you know what you should do exactly and it is still far to write the whole thesis. On the other hand, each PGR student has its own path depending on her/his research project, so you never know what challenges may arise at this stage. During my 2^nd year of the PhD in Sociology at the University of Manchester, I completed fieldwork, analyzed most of the empirical data, and gained teaching experience. I decided not to make these things all together and spent several months for each of these activities separately.

Teaching

In September 2018, I came back to Manchester from the 2^nd field trip to Russia and as a teaching assistant joined two courses, Media, Culture & Society and Researching Culture & Society, given at the University of Manchester. Before the PhD I had already taught in Moscow Universities. However, as far as British and Russian systems of higher education differ, there was something new for me to learn. New teaching assistants have to take introductory courses explaining, for example, how to protect confidential information about students, how to solve a problem of cultural diversity in the classroom, how to assess students’ records and give feedback, etc. Only after the completion of these introductory courses you are allowed to start teaching.

The Whitworth Building of the University of Manchester. Photo by Alexandrina Vanke

From October to December 2018, I gave seminars (called tutorials at the University of Manchester) in four groups, in two for each of the course. There were approx. 10 students in each group. It took me two-three days of preparation, and one day of teaching. Normally teaching assistants should read the required and additional literature for tutorials (up to 10 positions for one tutorial) and facilitate a discussion in the classroom. Lecturers prepare questions for the discussion beforehand. You may be creative and add something else but a seminar has already a structure though. The things you are required to do is to help students to get answers to the questions based on the reading and support them in critical debating the issues formulated by the lecturer.

By the mid-autumn, each student had to submit a written work on one of the topics proposed by the lecturer and based on the recommended reading. For me, the assessment of students’ essays was the most time-consuming part of teaching. It was absolutely different from the assessment process I used to do in Russian Unis. At the University of Manchester, you should estimate an essay on a 100-point scale and explain in detail (i.e. to write feedback), why you gave a particular mark to a student. In addition, you should assess different elements of each essay on a 10-point scale, e.g. creativity, methodology, originality, critical reflection, arguments, etc.

The campus of the University of Manchester. Photo by Alexandrina Vanke

At the time of teaching, I spent one-two days in the working week for my PhD research and sometimes weekends. In spite of new challenges, it was really great for me to change the activity: to switch from fieldwork to teaching. In addition, I got to know some new approaches from the course Media, Culture & Society, which I may use in PhD, and broadened knowledge in qualitative research methods thanks to the course Researching Culture & Society. At the beginning of December 2018, I went to Boston to present PhD research at the Annual Conference of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. After coming back to Manchester I gave the final class and in the next couple of days headed to Moscow to undertake the final phase of fieldwork.

Fieldwork

The research design of my PhD project ‘Working-class life and struggle in post-Soviet Russia’ is based on the approach of multi-sited ethnography and involved collecting ethnographic data in two localities. Fieldwork took place in two field sites and was split into three phases. By the end of the 1^st year of the PhD (read more: here), I had two field trips to Yekaterinburg and Moscow and collected most of the empirical data in two industrial neighbourhoods located in these two cities. After the 2^nd field trip, I formulated some new suggestions, which needed to be supported by additional empirical data.

To check the provisional arguments, I decided to undertake the 3^rd phase of fieldwork in Moscow between December 2018 and January 2019. During this final field trip, I came back to the examined Moscow neighbourhood and conducted some more interviews with its residents. However, this phase aimed at researching the experiences of workers who took part in trade union activity. As far as this winter field trip coincided with long New Year celebrations in Russia, it was quite problematic to arrange meetings with potential participants. If people agreed for the interviews, our talks were long and occurred in a warm and relaxing atmosphere, sometimes over tea at the participant’s place.

An announcement of my presentation at the colloquium. Made by Francisca Ortiz Ruiz

In February 2019, I finished collecting data and came back to Manchester being ready to move onto the next stage of data analysis. Finally, my database consisted of 53 ethnographic interviews, 155 pages of field notes, more than 550 photographs and other visual data. I was invited to present the PhD project at the PGR colloquium organized by my peers from Sociology. The process of preparation for the colloquium allowed me to build a more or less coherent visual narrative with sociological ethnography and to see that I had enough empirics for putting a puzzle together.

Data analysis

The spring semester of the 2^nd year was fully dedicated to work with empirical data. First of all, interview transcripts needed anonymization and creation of an anonymization log with records about places data, which was removed or replaced by pseudonyms. I changed the names of research participants, and the names of their relatives and friends mentioned in interviews, the names of neighbourhoods, streets, and other recognizable spots, numbers of schools and house buildings, etc.

My desk in the office of the Department of Sociology. Photo by Alexandrina Vanke

At the next stage, from March to July 2019, I coded all anonymized interview transcripts in NVivo 12 software. Before coding my supervisors advised me to choose three absolutely different interviews from the data set – I chose one interview from each of three fieldwork phases – and to create the initial codes, which changed slightly in the following process of coding. At the beginning, the codes looked a bit unstructured, but later I restructured them and generated child codes related to the key categories. On the one hand, the process of coding was routine and monotonous. On the other hand, coding in NVivo helped me to structure ethnographic data and create a detailed hierarchy of codes, which consists of more than 670 items now.

I generated some codes ‘bottom-up’ from empirical data and some codes ‘top-down’ by keeping in mind theory. Now it is clear that coding in NVivo was the first step toward bridging empirical data with theory, theory with empirical data in my PhD research. Emotions were also there. While rereading interviews, I was sometimes weeping, sometimes laughing. Well, the everyday life of workers in Russia is really hard, but there is also a place for humour and resilience.

Presenting PhD research at the BSA conference. Photo by Francisca Ortiz Ruiz

In April I presented the intermediated results of data analysis at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association which took place in Glasgow. May and June were fully spent on preparing a field report and other research documents for the annual review. In the field report, I tried to write a sociological ethnography – which was not easy for me – and figured out how the empirical chapters of the thesis may look like. At the end of the 2^nd year of the PhD I presented the field report at the annual review. The reviewer gave me insightful feedback on empirical research and helpful advice on the theoretical framework. Inspired by the stimulating discussion at the annual review, I am looking forward to moving onto the next stage and starting writing the thesis.

Russian Workers an ‘Invisible Class’ Since Collapse of Soviet Union, New Study Concludes

26.01.2018 ~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

Text by: Paul Goble

Staunton, January 11 – Russians employed in factories have become “an invisible group” in society since 1991; and as a result, the identity even now is based largely on memories of the Soviet past as exacerbated by their sense of growing social inequality, according to a new study by the Higher School of Economics of workers at the Uralmash plant.

The study, prepared by Elizaveta Polukhina and Anna Strelnikova of the HSE and Alexandrina Vanke of the University of Manchester, notes that since the end of the Soviet Union, workers have received very little attention, including from sociologists and other scholars (iq.hse.ru/news/213569213.html).

This has left members of this group “lost” because they had been respected in Soviet times; but “in the 1990s everything changed completely.” They lost their former status in society and watched as their relative position in the income pyramid fell precipitously, the three researchers say.

Uralmash, set up in the northern section of Yekaterinburg in 1927 was a workers’ settlement based on a number of factories. It was one of dozens of such settlements in Soviet times. At present, more than 190,000 people live there, a number far lower than in the past. The HSE researchers conducted deep interviews with a number of the remaining workers.

These settlements, the sociologists say, were intended to provide everything the workers needed and to root them to one place. As such, they served as an important component of the Soviet system of control. But despite what many might think, many there now recall that arrangement as a positive thing.

Most of the workers now say they felt like “part of a large family,” one in which their days and even their lives were predictable and in which they could expect to be taken care of cradle to grave. They say they were proud to be “simple Soviet people,” a category that they defined more in ethical terms than in class ones.

For these workers, the collapse of the Soviet system as completely negative and remains so. And if they were quite happy to talk about the Soviet period, they were much more restrained in discussing the 1990s, the three sociologists say. For them, that period meant wage arrears, the loss of many fellow workers, and search for a new place in life.

The sociologists say that even now, workers at Uralmash view themselves as “innocent ‘victims of circumstances.’” As a result, “the contemporary identity of workers is a kind of mix which includes Soviet and post-Soviet practices, meanings and values,” but it still focuses on values rather than income alone.

“This doesn’t mean that class distinctions have disappeared entirely. To a large extent,” the three write, “identity is defined as a result of a sense of social stratification.” Workers don’t feel comfortable dealing with managers or owners and don’t have the same social cohesion they once had particularly as younger workers gain education and move away.

Read the orginal text here.