Endorsements

In post-industrial societies, the dominant system of cultural signification reproduces the images of workers as a relic of the past, representing them as passive, weak, non-progressive and backward. This ethnographic study breaks these stereotypes. Exploring the urban life of working-class and ordinary people in major Russian cities, the book offers a novel approach to the everyday struggle of local communities in deindustrialising settings. Drawing on analysis of rich multi-sensory data, the author argues that workers are actively engaged in a wide range of practical activities taking place in their industrial neighbourhoods and other contexts of post-industrial cities. In case of Russia, this engagement in everyday struggle - mediated by Soviet and post-Soviet structures - allows workers to form class-consciousness of political and practical kind under neoliberal neo-authoritarian regime considerably restricting the opportunities for open collective protests. The approach of urban life elaborated in the book provides insight into the sensual, imaginary and practical aspects of everyday struggle helping to reveal the mechanisms of inequalities that working-class communities experience in city space and society. This valuable multi-sited ethnography with the elements of arts-based research revises our understanding of class feeling, deindustrialisation, neighbourhood, inequality, struggle and resistance. It contributes to the debate about the creative forms of everyday resistance of deindustrialising communities and the role of the working classes in social change. At the same time, the book provides a complex explanation of the processes in the whole Russian society.