SEMINAR: ‘“I don’t really like tedious, monotonous work”. Ordinary girls, service sector employment and social mobility in contemporary Russia'
- When?
- Wednesday 7 November 2012, 16.00 to 17.00
- Where?
- 08 AC 03
- Open to:
- Public, Staff, Students
- Speaker:
- Charlie Walker, University of Southampton
This paper explores the changing nature of transitions to adulthood amongst working-class young women in post-Soviet Russia, in a context in which both access to higher education and new forms of service sector employment have grown considerably in recent years. Drawing on case study research from the city of St. Petersburg (2008), the article examines the transformations of class and gender that these wider changes in education and the labour market have brought about in young women’s transitions by exploring the experiences of ‘ordinary’ working-class girls training for and entering a variety of forms of service sector employment. As will be seen, the young women use new forms of education and employment as sites for the construction of a range of imagined futures, which allow them to create value in relation both to their class and gender positions (Skeggs 1997, 2005, 2011). In particular, forms of ‘interactive service work’ enable the young women to distance themselves from the more denigrated, ‘mass’ forms of employment traditionally undertaken by the Soviet working class and still undertaken in provincial Russia, and at the same time, to enter into worlds of work requiring gendered performances that are more congruent with currently dominant notions of femininity. While the aesthetic dimensions of interactive service work thus allow young women reflexively to construct new and more desirable ‘selves’, however, the article highlights the limits of the new service sector and education system as sources of ‘real’ social mobility. As has been argued in similar studies of young women in the West (Walkerdine et al 2001), Russia’s variant of neo-liberalism simultaneously demands social mobility whilst making it nearly impossible, as the young women’s individualised narratives are not enough to overcome the classed and gendered barriers they confront in attempting to navigate the realities of the new education and labour markets.
Bio
Charlie Walker joined Southampton from the Russian and Eurasian Studies Centre at St Antony's College, University of Oxford, where from 2007 he was CEELBAS Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Social Inequality in Russia and Eastern Europe. Prior to this, he received his PhD from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the European Research Institute, University of Birmingham. His research interests lie in the sociologies of youth, gender, work and education, with a geographical focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. His research has explored processes of social stratification surrounding youth transitions to adulthood, focusing in particular on the influences of class, gender and place in shaping differential educational and labour market outcomes amongst young people in post-socialist states. His contributions to the field include the monograph Learning to Labour in post-Soviet Russia (Routledge 2011) and the edited collection (with Svetlana Stephenson) Youth and Social Change in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union (Routledge 2012).
Charlie is currently conducting research on men and masculinities in Russia, examining men’s gendered performances at home, work and leisure and exploring the relationship between these performances and different dimensions of well-being. He is also co-investigator in a project exploring the well-being of the elderly and of families with young children in Moscow.
Alongside his research interests, Charlie has interests in qualitative and ethnographic research methods. He is editor (with Sue Heath) of Innovations in Youth Research (Palgrave 2012).