Working-class life and struggle

Between 2017 and 2021, I was conducting a doctoral project Working-class life and struggle in post-Soviet Russia at the University of Manchester. After its completion, I earned a PhD degree in Sociology. My forthcoming book The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle  to be released in January 2024 by Manchester University Press develops that research further.

Drawing on multi-sited ethnography, my research examines the everyday lives and struggles of working-class communities in two industrial neighbourhoods located in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg, Russia. The study addresses three interrelated sub-themes: workers’ lives in urban industrial areas; the everyday inequalities they face; and the everyday struggles in which they engage. The data upon which the project is based includes 53 interviews, more than 150 pages of field notes and visual data produced by the researcher and research participants. The study’s overarching research question asks why workers living in particular socio-material conditions become engaged in specific forms of everyday struggles – or do not.

The project results have been published in the following research articles.

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

^{This article explores how structures of feeling shape everyday life and local atmospheres in two industrial neighbourhoods located in the cities of Moscow and Yekaterinburg. Developing Raymond Williams’s concept of structure of feeling, I conceptualise it as an affective principle regulating sensual experiences, spatial imaginaries and practical activities of local communities within socio-material infrastructures. I argue that Soviet (socialist/industrial/residual) and post-Soviet (neoliberal/post-industrial/emergent) structures of feeling co-exist in senses, imaginaries and the landscapes of Russia’s deindustrialising urban areas. Working-class and long-standing middle-class residents show an affective attachment to place and tend to imagine their neighbourhoods with the help of an industrial structure of feeling comprising 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. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography in two locations, this article provides an empirically grounded theorisation of the concept of structure of feeling by bringing it in sociology of space and place and urban anthropology. It contributes to the debate about place attachment of deindustrialising communities and their vision of the past, present and future of their neighbourhoods by an extended understanding of structure of feeling not as a spirit of the time but as a multiple spirit of the time and place.}

Other materials related to the article:

• You can find a brief summary of the article in my blog post on this website and a short story about it on Kudos.
• You can read my reflection on the approach used in the article in the blog post Applying creative ethnography in the study of deindustrialising neighbourhoods which I wrote for SAGE Perspectives.
• I also explain the methodology of my research in the conversational videos on multi-sited ethnography and mental mapping recorded for Discover Sociology on request of the British Sociological Association.

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

^{Increased inequalities around the globe have led social researchers to invent innovative methodologies to study how people subjectively perceive inequality and imagine society. This article presents the development of an arts-informed method, ‘drawing of society’, applied to a multi-sited ethnography of everyday inequalities in two major post-industrial cities of Russia. It contributes to the debate on lay perceptions of social structure by looking at moral and symbolic signifiers of inequality. Building on multi-sensory data, I argue that workers and professionals tend to imagine Russian society as divided between a small group of the rich and a large group of the poor and as consisting of social classes. Ordinary people self-identify with the poor and perceive their position as being at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Depending on their lived experiences, research participants express their sense of inequality through the narrative strategies of compliance, inversion and subversion of power hierarchies.}

• Please find a brief summary of the key points of the article in my blog post on this website.

More publications from this and further research on urban life in post-industrial cities are coming soon.