Private Life, Public Action

Anna Zhelnina is Assistant Professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University. She is the coauthor of Gains and Losses: How Protestors Win and Lose.

“Anna Zhelnina’s impressive research draws on social movement theory—especially the strategic interactionist perspective—to explain struggles over urban redevelopment in Putin’s Moscow. These struggles forced ordinary people to articulate and sometimes reevaluate their strategies for improving—or escaping—their current housing and physical environments. Zhelnina demonstrates how political contention develops out of individuals’ habitual life strategies and how these habits are transformed, in turn, by contentious politics.” — Jeff Goodwin, Professor of Sociology at New York University, and author of No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991 “Private Life, Public Action is a brilliant work of urban sociology, offering a finely textured microsociological lens on housing, redevelopment, and activism in authoritarian Russia. Anna Zhelnina moves beyond simplistic accounts of protest, revealing the subtle everyday practices through which citizens engage the urban public. Her careful analysis illuminates the complex logics of grassroots action, resulting in an immensely rich and original portrait of urban mobilization in today’s Russia. A vital read for scholars of cities, society, and power.” — Matthias Bernt , Leibniz-Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner, Germany, and author of The Commodification Gap: Gentrification and Public Policy in London, Berlin and St. Petersburg