Tag: writing ethnography

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…

The release day of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

It’s release day! I am delighted to announce that The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is out now!

GET A COPY

Many thanks to all people whose support made this book possible. I am grateful to Manchester University Press for their professionalism and high quality book production. The process of crafting this book was inspiring for me, despite the dark times throughout which I was writing it.

The book is centered on the stories of urban workers in Russian society. But I hope that an international reader gets something useful about how ‘ordinary people’ overcome life difficulties with meagre resources they possess. This practical knowledge may be especially valuable in the era of crises and conflicts we live now as humankind.

In this final blog post in the series about The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia, I would like to discuss briefly its contents.

As I wrote earlier, the book consists of three parts. The first one Theoretical sketches presents my ethnographically grounded synthesis of the concepts allowing a critical reflection on the challenges that workers and other city dwellers face in deindustrialising urban areas. Chapter 1 develops a novel theory of urban life and everyday struggle building the network of revised concepts, including structure of feeling, senses, imaginaries, order of power, everyday struggle, consciousness and habitus.

The second part Ways of life tells the story about everyday life in Russia’s major post-industrial cities and Russian society as a whole.

Chapter 2 provides the setting of the story discussing the local atmospheres, sensual experiences and spatial imaginaries in the two industrial neighbourhoods located in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg. Chapter 3 considers spatialised gendered senses of working-class people and intersectional inequalities in the industrial neighbourhoods studied.

Chapter 4 analyses the symbolic and moral meanings of social groups in Russia, including the working class and the middle class, mentioned by research participants from both cities. This chapter pays special attention to moral judgement and blaming working and poor people by wealthier classes intensified in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. Chapter 5 examines research participants’ subjective perceptions of the whole Russian society by looking at their social imaginaries and everyday inequalities they experience daily.

The third part Ways of struggle explores different forms of struggle and particular consciousness emerging from engagement in them.

Chapter 6 focuses on open protests, including trade union strikes and social movements, leading to the formation of dispositions of protest and political consciousness. It shows how the objective restrictions for massive collective actions were steadily increasing in Russia throughout the 2010s and dropped to minimum in 2022.

Chapter 7 explains how workers and other residents of deindustrialising areas are actively engaged in the everyday forms of resistance to multiple challenges caused by neoliberalism and neo-authoritarianism. This long-standing engagement in everyday struggle leads to the formation of habituated resistance and practical consciousness of creative nature.

If you want to help The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia become visible, please consider taking the following action:

  • order the book for your library or recommend it to your librarian;
  • request a free copy from Manchester University Press to write a review;
  • include it in your syllabus or reading list.

By signing up to the MUP newsletter, you will get 30% discount on this title.

Enjoy the book!

On building a discursive strategy for The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

I have great news! The release day of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia was rescheduled for the 9th January 2024. It will be available earlier than expected. Christmas is coming and my book is coming too!

The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia became possible thanks to support of communities. Before writing this post, I launched a short survey asking my friends what they would like to know else about it. Most of them replied that they were interested in knowing how I built a discursive strategy for the book. This topic followed by the role of epigraphs in book chapters. And several friends were curious about what books influenced my writing style.

This monthly post discusses these issues.

What is a discursive strategy?

I would like to start with the definition. By discursive strategies, linguists Ruth Wodak and Martin Reisigl mean ‘a more or less accurate and more or less intentional plan of practices (including discursive practices) adopted to achieve a certain aim’ (2015: 585). Applying this to academic non-fiction, I rather view discursive strategies as sets of semantic, stylistic and representational decisions that authors make reflexively and situationally in the process of writing texts to achieve particular aims related to knowledge production, articulation and dissemination.

For me, building a discursive strategy about ‘ordinary people’ (in Russia and elsewhere) implies a creation of an alternative overarching frame for writing about them, as well as choosing consciously what words, phrases and expressions to use and not use when I represent research participants. This implies reflection on how turn separate stories into a coherent grand narrative about ordinary lives and struggles in contemporary societies.

The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia criticises negative and stereotypical representations of working-class people typical for dominant media and academic discourses, and especially blaming and shaming discourses about Russia’s poor that became widespread in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. In contrast to this, my book focuses on ordinary people’s everyday struggle suggesting an alternative genre of writing about them. According to the book description, this genre of writing is influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.

Why and how to use epigraphs

Using epigraphs, i.e. short quotations or sayings, in the beginning of a book, chapter or even section, can be part of the discursive strategy. With the help of epigraphs an author can not only introduce the main idea of their text to a reader, but also build the relationships with other texts from particular literary or intellectual traditions.

In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, anthropologist James Scott uses proverbs and quotations from texts written in different genres in the beginning of his book, chapters and some sections. For epigraphs, Scott prefers the extracts from plays by Euripides, Jean Genet and Václav Havel; novels by George Eliot, Onore de Balzak, George Orwell and Milan Kundera; philosophical works by Blaise Pascal, Immanuel Kant and Alexander Herzen; and academic non-fiction by Paul Willis, Michel de Certeau and other authors. This set of references shows that Scott is anchoring his writing in the European intellectual tradition. However, most of these authors were white men, apart from George Eliot who was a white woman.

While I was selecting epigraphs for The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia, I tried to quote people who were white and black, men and women. Most of them were writing between the 19th and 20th centuries. But similarly to Scott I start one chapter on open protests with the quotation from The Suppliant Women by Euripides: ‘All our life is struggle’ – because one research participant, a trade union activist, paraphrased it in the interview.

For epigraphs in other chapters, I quoted literary theorists Valentin Vološinov and Viktor Shklovsky and writers Maxim Gorky and Victor Serge to show the inter-textual connections of my writing with the early Soviet avant-garde literary tradition. This literary tradition is characterised by experimentation and alternative representation of workers. Sociologists Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall – whose quotations I also used for epigraphs – analysed and developed avant-garde approaches.

To contextualise my writing within the feminist intellectual tradition, which my book develops further, I quoted in epigraphs such writers and public figures, as Clara Zetkin, Alexandra Kolontai, Angela Davis and Kimberlé Crénshaw. They all contributed to the struggle of the oppressed for social justice and provided us with valuable writing strategies.

Books and authors that influenced my writing

I started thinking more seriously of how I was writing about workers during my PhD at Manchester, the city with a long tradition of working-class literature. To enhance my writing skills, I started reading British fiction about social classes. Novels Second Generation and Border Country by Raymond Williams influenced not only my way of thinking about writing, but also inspired me for building my discursive strategy.

Everyday Post-Socialism: Working-Class Communities in the Russian Margins, academic non-fiction by sociologist and anthropologist Jeremy Morris appeared to be important for my reflection on how I can write about Russia’s workers and Russian society as a whole. Apart from inheriting critical ethnography, Morris’s writing style is situated at the intersection of British and Soviet working-class literatures.

Moreover, in Manchester, whether you want it or not, you will learn about historian E.P. Thompson, the author of The Making of the English Working Class, and writer Elizabeth Gaskell who worked with the genre of the industrial novel. I cannot help but mention Marx and Engels whose explorations of working-class people in Manchester formed the ground for their books.

At the same time, I was reading contemporary working-class writers and scholars, including a collection of essays Common People, academic books by Doreen Massey and other authors. Last but not least, I really enjoy reading Jonathan Coe, novelist from Midlands writing political satire, whose fictional characters ranging from working-class people to the elites live on the pages of his books.

The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia explains in detail the novel genre of writing that I suggest social scholars trying in their writing process.

On crafting illustrations for The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

This is the third blogpost in the series about The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia. The book will be out in two months in January 2024. I am very excited about this and looking forward to receiving comments from the readers and reviewers.

From its short description, you may learn that the book draws on the ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research. Earlier I wrote about how I integrated poetry in academic writing (read here). In this post, I would like to explain how I used illustrations to support the textual narrative and my overarching argument.

The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia includes about 30 black and white illustrations of three types.

First, I illustrate one of my arguments about the complexity of socio-spatial imaginaries with drawings of the industrial neighbourhoods and Russian society made by research participants with a black pen. I obtained these drawings with verbal explanations during interviews with workers and professionals. Drawings with explanations are multi-sensory data created by participants. That is why I view my participants as co-creators of unique data for this ethnographic study. These drawings are as important as interview narratives and other data. They visualise the feelings of residents of the industrial neighbourhoods to their places of residence and their subjective perceptions of inequality and whole Russian society.   

Second, I use some ethnographic photographs taken during fieldwork in Moscow and Yekaterinburg cities. The photographs help to provide the reader with a sense of atmosphere in two locations studied. Some of them show the urban settings and infrastructure of the industrial neighbourhoods. Some others focus on practical activities of ordinary people, such as collective maintenance of deindustrialising areas and cultivating mini-gardens near social housing blocks. For illustrations, I selected those photographs that did not show particiapants’ faces to align with the ethical principles of anonymity. I also use a photograph of a massive May Day Demo in St. Petersburg by Pyotr Prinyov from the mid-2010s to explain better the restrictions for open protests in today’s Russia.

Finally, I crafted several graphic illustrations with the help of drawing skills that I learnt from artist Victoria Lomasko within our course ‘Avant-garde and arts-based methods in qualitative research’. With a black marker, I drew the portraits of some research participants, as well as workers of different ages, genders and ethnicities who I met in a post-industrial city. Moreover, I entitled the first part of the book ‘Theoretical sketches’ not only because ‘Poetical Sketches’ by William Blake inspired my writing. Synthesising a novel theory of urban life, this first part includes my graphic sketches visually explaining the conceptualisation of structure of feeling and everyday struggle.

In the book, I combine the textual register with the visual one to tell the story about the urban life of workers vividly and vibrantly. The idea of such a creative approach to academic writing is not (only) to entertain the reader but not to leave them indifferent.

If you are interested in writing a book review, you can request a free copy of The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia on the website of Manchester University Press (click here). If you can, please purchase the book via your University or local library to make it available to a wider community of readers (click here).

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.

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 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

The Last Stretch to the PhD during the COVID-19 Pandemic

~ Alexandrina Vanke ~ Leave a comment

From November 23, Greater Manchester moved to the local COVID alert level 3 due to the increased infection rate. This information reached me via e-mail as part of the news feed from the University of Manchester, where I am doing my PhD in Sociology. What does it mean for students? We cannot socialise with people from other households in public places. We can neither accept guests at home and in private gardens nor visit other people at their home. But in fact, it means that if you are an international student, you are very likely to continue living in isolation. If you would like to meet friends in person, the only option for you is to walk with them in the park social distancing. Although the rainy Mancunian weather does not permit this much. If you do not want to break the rules, you can merely hang out remotely.

In such a context, I am entering the last stretch to the PhD, which is the most difficult one, as my local friend with a doctoral degree says. In this post, I reflect some challenges, which I face at the final stage of the thesis writing under the local lockdown in Manchester. I explain how I attempt to meet these challenges.

The lack of proper rest

One of the problems, which PhD students with funding face, is that the studentship will run out one day. In my view, it is better to complete your thesis by that moment or at least not shortly afterwards. I know some people will disagree with me saying that it is better to spend more time in the PhD to build a solid CV and improve a publication record.

Well, it depends on your life situation, personal goals and your programme. For example, anthropologists spend at least one year in the field, and it takes more time for them to complete a PhD. It also depends on what academic profile you already have and at what stage of your professional path you are. Bearing this in mind, I worked hard throughout the whole summer and autumn trying to improve the chapters, which I drafted during my third year.

Another problem at this stage is that you need to start applying for jobs or/and elaborate your postdoctoral project if your goal is to continue working in academia. Apart from this, you may need to write some other texts, for example, journal articles, and do a side job in teaching, research or somewhere else. As for me, I entirely focused on improving the thesis draft and preparing an application for the postdoctoral fellowship. I also applied for several jobs. The purpose of this activity was to understand what was happening with the academic labour market during the pandemic and gain experience in applying for positions of different types.

As a result, I did not have enough time for proper rest and sufficient breaks.

Possible solutions

  • Under the local lockdown, you do not have many opportunities to take proper rest. For me, sunbathing on the lawn with the neighbours in summer and regular walks in the park in autumn was the best solution to this problem. It helped me to keep my mind off the work and the laptop screen. I enjoyed walking, observing squirrels, greeting people accurately social distancing, and breathing in the smell of trees in the park. However, it will be more difficult to make in late autumn.
  • Sometimes, I visited a neighbourhood café with a garden, where I enjoyed chatting with a barista, drinking coffee or having lunch in the open air. I know that some students save money and prefer eating at home. I can do nothing with this habit. It cheers me up and increases my productivity. If you find it problematic to go out in the lockdown, you can make a proper meal for yourself and have it watching a good movie.© Photo by the author

Continue reading “The Last Stretch to the PhD during the COVID-19 Pandemic” →

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

~ 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.

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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.

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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.

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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 3rd 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

~ 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 3rd 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 1st 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.