Everyday Post-Socialism

Jeremy Morris is Co-director of the Centre for Russian, European and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Birmingham, UK. A disciplinary pluralist, his research aims to capture the actually lived experience of neoliberal and post-socialist transformation in Russia. He is co-editor of The Informal Post-Socialist Economy (2014) and Informal Economies in Post-Socialist Spaces(Palgrave, 2015).

“Morris’s ethnographic approach is an immersive one. … this book can confidently be placed on undergraduate and graduate reading lists for courses that relate to contemporary Russia and its recent past across many different disciplines, as well as general courses on comparative post-socialism or informal practices.” (Mark B. Smith, Slavonic and East European Review SEER, Vol. 97 (2), April, 2019)

• Part I. Spaces and Places.- Introduction: The ‘Worthless’ Dowry of Soviet Industrial Modernity.- 1. Blue-collar Personhood after the Factory.- 2. Informal Economy: going underground but coming out of the shadows.- 3. A Woman’s Kingdom? Affect, care and regendering labour.- Part II: Unhomely Presents – Uncertain Futures.- 4. Unhomely Presents: Trauma and values of endurance among older people.- 5. No Country for Young Men: encountering neoliberalism in transnational corporations.- Part III: On Personhoods in Place.- 6. Intimate Ethnography and Cross-cultural Research.- Conclusions. Making Habitable Lives in Small-town Russia.