Alexandrina Vanke is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester. Her expertise lies in the areas of deindustrialization, the lived experiences of the working class, grassroots modifications of urban space and changes in post-socialist cities.
Her book ‘The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia: Engaging in everyday struggle’ (Manchester University Press, 2024, 2026) provides a novel account of the everyday in post-industrial cities. Her ethnographic research develops innovative qualitative methodologies for the study of deindustrialization, as well as the concepts of structure of feeling and everyday struggle in regard to daily life, inequality and creative mundane resistance in deindustrializing urban spaces.
Within the DéPOT project she contributes to the themes ‘Deindustrialization and the Environment’ and ‘Working-class Expression’.
Project Statement:
Everyday environmentalism of deindustrialising communities
Following from my doctoral research, which examined the lived experiences of working-class communities in Russia’s post-industrial cities, this project develops the argument of the environmental dimension of practical consciousness of urban workers also discussed in my forthcoming book. This new project looks specifically at everyday environmental and ecological activities of Moscow city dwellers in deindustrialising urban districts, which experience rapid neoliberal changes. Within this research, I am particularly interested in working-class environmentalism considered in the context on increasing inequalities in the post-industrial city. I explore such practical activities of city dwellers, as engagement in grassroots urban gardening and growing vegetables, collective cleanings of post-industrial districts, recycling and dealing with rubbish, and conscious consumption. The project builds on the approach of creative ethnography combining the mainstream qualitative methods of observation and participation with photographs and short videos of urban space and the innovative methods, such as researcher’s quick drawings of real life-situations and environmental activities, and audio-records of natural sounds in the post-industrial city.
Her other publications include:
Vanke, A. (2024). Co-existing structures of feeling: Senses and imaginaries of industrial neighbourhoods. The Sociological Review, 72(2), 276-300.
Vanke, A. (2026). Reconceptualising the Working Class in Contemporary Russia. In: Odhav, K., Govender, J. (eds) Sociology of Inequalities in BRICS Countries. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. P. 103-118.
Vanke, A. (2026). Theorising everyday struggle: Everyday environmentalism as creative resistance in the city. Current Sociology, 0(0).
Website: https://alexandrinavanke.com/
