Additional information
by Alexandrina Vanke (Author)
Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses.
This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism. The book suggests a novel approach to everyday life in post-industrial cities. Drawing on an ethnographic study with elements of arts-based research, the book presents a new genre of writing about workers influenced by the avant-garde documentary tradition and working-class literature.Back Jacket
'Vanke's research is as timely as it is painstaking. She effortlessly reveals the hidden life of political engagement and deep content of ordinary people's lives in this pathbreaking new ethnography of Russia.'
--Jeremy Morris, Professor of Global Studies, Aarhus University
--Mike Savage, Professor of Sociology, London School of Economics 'Drawing on a creative mix of Bourdieu, intersectionality theory and feminist geography, this deep study of postindustrial workers in contemporary Russia will challenge and enrich your views of class, everyday politics and the city.' -- Lo?c Wacquant, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley 'Vanke aims to counter dismissive attitudes toward subordinate groups by showing how they resist a hostile neoliberal world in multiple creative ways.' --Claudio Morrison, Middlesex University In post-industrial societies, the dominant system of cultural signification reproduces an image of workers as relics of the past - passive, weak and backward. This ethnographic study breaks these stereotypes. Exploring the urban life of working-class people in major Russian cities, the book offers a novel approach to the everyday struggle of local communities in deindustrialising settings. Drawing on rich multi-sensory data, the author argues that workers are actively engaged in a wide range of practical activities in their industrial neighbourhoods and post-industrial cities. In Russia, this engagement - mediated by Soviet and post-Soviet structures - allows workers to form political and practical class consciousness under a neoliberal neo-authoritarian regime that restricts public protest. The approach to urban life elaborated in the book provides fresh insight into the sensual, imaginary and practical aspects of everyday struggle, revealing the mechanisms of inequality that working-class communities experience in city space and society. This multi-sited ethnography with elements of arts-based research revitalises our understanding of class feeling, deindustrialisation, inequality, struggle and resistance, and contributes to debates about creative forms of everyday resistance and the role of the working classes in social change.
Author Biography
Alexandrina Vanke is a Senior Research Fellow at the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applies Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow
Number of Pages: 256
Dimensions: 0.53 x 8.5 x 5.5 IN
Illustrated: Yes
Publication Date: January 20, 2026
