Bring Your Own Politics : Life Strategies and Mobilization in Response to Urban Redevelopment

This article contributes to social movement literature and theories of strategic action by making the case for an analytic distinction between habitual and intentional life strategies, namely the ways in which people pursue what they value in life. Housing strategies are one example of life strategies. The distinction helps explain how political players, including social movements, bring about social change (or preserve the status quo) by changing or reinforcing people’s minds and their preferred ways of action. They can achieve their goals by first recognizing these habitual strategies, and then prompting people to articulate or adjust them during interactive, group-level situations. My analysis relies on a qualitative study of Renovation, a controversial urban renewal project in Moscow. I examine how Muscovites revisited, articulated and sometimes revised their housing strategies in response to the surprising, and for some, shocking announcement of the relocation project.Peer reviewe

Social Science for What? : Battles over Public Funding for the "Other Sciences" at the National Science Foundation

Book review. Reviewed work: Social Science for What? Battles over Public Funding for the “Other Sciences” at the National Science Foundation / Mark Solovey. - Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2020.Non peer reviewe

Urbaner Aktivismus in Russland: "gewöhnliche" Bürger:innen, erfahrene Aktivist:innen und Gründe für vorsichtigen Optimismus

Der Mythos von der politischen Passivität der Russ:innen ist überraschend langlebig, trotz vielzähliger Belege für das Gegenteil, und zwar sowohl auf nationaler wie auch auf lokaler Ebene. Der Beitrag befasst sich mit lokalem Aktivismus in den großen Städten Russlands. Dieser Typ des Aktivismus erfährt in den landesweiten Medien zwar weniger Aufmerksamkeit, doch sind es gerade die Versuche der Städter:innen, vor Ort gemeinsam ihr Leben zu gestalten und bei der Sanierung, Umgestaltung oder Neuentwicklung städtischer Flächen, die für die Nachhaltigkeit der Zivilgesellschaft eine zentrale Rolle spielen, eine Wahrung ihrer Interessen zu verlangen. Durch eine Beteiligung an lokalen Initiativen erwerben Städter:innen neue Fähigkeiten; darüber hinaus erzeugen sie neue politische Identitäten und soziale Verbindungen

Engaging Neighbors: Housing Strategies and Political Mobilization in Moscow\u27s Renovation

In summer 2017, residents of thousands of socialist-era apartment buildings in Moscow were invited to vote and decide whether their building should be included in the demolition and relocation program proposed by the Mayor’s Office. Renovation is an ongoing urban renewal plan, first announced in Moscow in February 2017, to demolish whole neighborhoods of socialist-era, five-story buildings and replace them with high-rises. The vast project affected more than 5,000 buildings with approximately a million inhabitants. This dissertation addresses general questions of political agency and the possibility for diverse people in urban neighborhoods to produce change: to achieve desired policy outcomes, transform the rules of political interactions and the configuration of players in the urban political field. Inevitably, the interests, aspirations, and strategies of these people differ. In this thesis, I explore how these different aspirations and different life experiences clash, overlap, and develop into collective strategies, which can transform the relationships of the urban political field. To connect the experiences of Moscow residents facing urban renewal with the longstanding sociological debates, I synthesize theories of agency and strategy, theories of strategic interaction in social movement research, and urban scholarship on citizenship. Housing is a fundamental human goal, and ways of achieving and keeping a proper home shape a person’s housing strategy. Renovation soon turned into a housing struggle. The reason it sparked a high degree of mobilization in a relatively politically apathetic society is the thing it targeted: housing is literally the issue closest to home, able to provoke even politically indifferent people to act. I seek to demonstrate that political action partly grows out of individual strategies, motivations, aspirations, and feelings. These personal strategies, too, result in turn from earlier social and cultural processes. Renovation pulled Muscovites into the urban political field, a configuration of interactive arenas where decisions about the city in general and its specific parts can be negotiated. Setting foot in one arena could also motivate citizens to further explore the outlines of the field, and engage in interactions in further linked arenas, such as municipal elections. Previously, not many Muscovites had used or even known about the different arenas of urban and local politics, but the shock of potentially losing their home in Renovation exposed those structures to more citizens than ever before. People learned and tried out individual arenas, learned about the connections between different political arenas, and created new arenas, for example, homeowners’ assemblies or meetings of the new activist communities

Social Movement Gains and Losses : Dilemmas of Arena Creation

Social movements never entirely win or lose, nor do they suddenly appear or disappear. Just as their component parts recombine and continue in other forms, so movements have dozens of impacts of various kinds. To make sense of this complexity we propose examining the outcomes of political interactions for a variety of players (including individuals) across a range of arenas. Given the acknowledged tradeoffs and dilemmas of collective action, we would expect packages of outcomes to appear together sometimes; for example, gains in street mobilization may lead to losses in the form of a damaged reputation or police repression. The first step to explaining such patterns is to identify and name them. We examine one of these outcome patterns, the arena-ownership package, through the case of Seattle's historic $15 per hour wage law passed in 2014, the first ever in a major U.S. city. The players who crafted the bill included an avowed Socialist, the owner of Seattle's iconic Space Needle tower, many representatives of the city's labor movement, and the newly elected Democratic Mayor Ed Murray. These diverse players moved through a series of complex arenas to arrive at the legislative outcome. In this case, we find players who create new arenas, rather than only using already-existing arenas. This move is associated with a typical package of gains and losses: increased control for the player on the one hand, but corresponding losses and risks—the alienation of excluded players and increased perception of responsibility. The creating player is blamed for the arena's failures as well as credited with its successes.Peer reviewe

THE METHODOLOGY FOR STUDYING URBAN CONFLICTS : LEVELS OF SCALING

Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Russian Public Opinion Research Center, VCIOM. All rights reserved.Аbstract. The paper focuses on the methodology of multilevel analysis of urban conflicts. The proposed approach is an alternative to the macro view of urban change through the lens of neoliberal theories that dominates the field of urban studies. Based on the methodology of strategic interactionism, we posit that mobilization for the transformation of the urban environment is primarily related to participants’ perspectives and goals, as well as their interactions with each other in “arenas” (physically and institutionally limited locations) that are embedded within temporal frames (“events”) that highlight sets of interactions from the mundane routine actions. Arenas and events provide a conceptual framework for exploring the microfoundations of urban conflict. The advantage of microfoundations is that they are directly observable and can be documented in a variety of ways available to the researcher. But we also posit that perspectives, goals, and interactions are embedded in broader spatial and temporal structures — "fields" and "episodes" of conflicts. Conflict interactions themselves are unique in terms of specific arenas and events, but more broadly they add up to regularities that can be described analytically, opening up opportunities for comparison and generalization. Our methodology thus makes it possible to link directly observable microfoundations with an analytically characterized mesolevel: despite the fact that “fields” and “episodes” are the result of analytical abstraction and do not exist “physically”, their identification helps to better understand the strategic nature of the interactions and associate a set of goals and actions in a sequence with an identifiable outcome. It also helps to link the “intermediate outcomes'' of interactions in certain arenas to the outcome of the conflict. Simultaneous attention to the micro and mesolevels of urban conflicts makes it possible to identify their structural (imbalance of resources, sociopolitical and economic hierarchies) and agentbased (goalsetting, strategic dilemmas, innovations, emotions) foundations. Using examples from our own research, we demonstrate how the presented conceptual apparatus can be translated into the specific instruments, methods, and analytical procedures.Peer reviewe

New laws that cast NGOs as “foreign agents” illustrate the threat to academic collaboration in Russia

In July, the Russian government passed a law forcing foreign funded NGOs to register as “foreign agents”. Elena Omelchenko and Anna Zhelnina write that this law is part of a trend for Russian authorities to attack social scientists that collaborate outside of the country and are funded by ‘western money’. This attitude threatens to seriously undermine the development of the social sciences in Russia

"Learning to use the public space": perception of the urban spaces in the post- soviet context

Abstract The paper addresses the issue of the public space in the post-soviet city on the example of St. Petersburg. The term 'public space' doesn't exist in the Russian-speaking discourse. In the official documents (such as the Strategic Plan) it is replaced by the neutral 'open urban space' which has little social connotations, meaning rather the space with no roof than a space of social activities. However, the usage of the 'open urban spaces' in modern St. Petersburg is a very conflicting and publicly discussed issue: on one hand, the squares and parks are crowded by good weather, people lying on grass, eating, and chatting, on the other hand, this picture is often presented by both city officials and some citizens as unacceptable, especially for the historic centre of the "Russia's cultural capital" (which is the unofficial title of St. Petersburg). The two concepts are analyzed on example of emerging public space in St. Petersburg in the 2000s. The research includes ethnographic observation in the public places and discourse analysis of the ongoing discussion regarding the public space in St. Petersburg. The hypothesis of the paper is that the current debate about the 'open space' shows the conflict between the old and the emerging new concept of urban space in modern Russia. The first is the concept of open urban space as a 'postcard' that should represent not the living city and its people, but the official and 'nice' views. This one is closely related to the soviet idea of the open urban space as a stage for rallies and demonstrations organized by the Communist Party, a space which was under permanent control of the officials and didn't 'belong' to the city inhabitants. The second concept has been emerging since last decade and is related to the humanist concept of 'city for the people'. Although not under the name of 'public space', the idea of public places for interaction appears in the media and is often expressed by the citizens. Dual city space and life in the soviet Leningrad The socialist era changed the balance between the private and public as well as the "nature of public space in Central and Eastern European cities by imploding its share, diffusing its patterns, and curtailing the mix of functions it contained" (Stanilov 2007: 271). A specific mode of urban public space in socialist cities was caused by political, economic and ideological characteristics of the soviet era, and it had to be revised again after the fall of the communist rule in the early 1990s. The capitalistic developments as well as inclusion of the ex-soviet cities into the global consumer culture have changed the urban policies and the everyday life significantly. However, the traces of the 'soviet past' still shape the modern culture of cities and the citizens identities. In the USSR the land -urban and rural -was entirely owned by the state and formally belonged "to everyone" (the same as nationalized industries and institutions). The formal status of the 'common space' however did not correspond with the functionality and use of the most spaces: central squares and streets were intended for the demonstrations and rallies initiated and choreographed by the state power. The public place within this concept was supposed to be a place of collective actions controlled by the authorities (Engel 2006: 167). The uncontrolled gatherings of people in the central open spaces were undesirable, and the everyday social interactions of city dwellers were pushed into the private domainssuch as kitchens, garages and backyards. The tangible division of life of the soviet citizens in two parts -public and private -has become a leitmotif in historical and anthropological research of the Soviet reality The Norwegian anthropologist F.S. Nielsen has found a spatial metaphor for this duality: prospekt (avenue) as a place which represents civilization, is well-conditioned and taken care for, and dvor (backyard) as a place where people actually live and interact; but dvor is not an open space -it is rather a place hidden from the outsider, an "ungoverned domain" (Nielsen 2004: 55). The general split of life into 3 private and public head spread onto the city space as well. The open spaces of the city did not function as the public places, where stranger interaction and diversity are possible. After the fall of the soviet system the private-public balance started changing: the role of the open spaces and the backyards had to be reinterpreted again. The changes were caused by global forces, switch from planned to market economy. The city restructuring was pushed on by the new economic and political conditions, but also the peculiarities of local policies and city image-making contributed to the reinterpretation of the public spaces and the city identity. Background of change in St. Petersburg: Europeanization In the post-soviet era St. Petersburg among many other Russian post-soviet cities had to develop a new management system and strategy. According to the new regulations of residence registration the "propiska" system was cancelled: the system that attached people to one place of residence which made it impossible to move and migrate freely around the country. The new law of 1993 "On the right of the citizens of the Russian Federation to freedom of movement, choice of place of residence in Russian Federation" caused the significant growth of the migration flows that transformed the structure of the big cities population strongly. It was accompanied by the intensification of the social problemsunemployment, fall of quality of life, marginalization of the population -it was all connected with the general industrial and employment system crisis

Movement Dilemmas under Authoritarianism : National and Local Activism in Russia

Scholars of social movements are often skeptical about the applicability of their analytical tools and theories, mainly developed for advanced democracies, to the analysis of civic and political life in authoritarian states. In this article, I will apply the micro-sociological strategic interactionist perspective to analyze the national political oppositionist movement and local grassroots mobilizations in Russia and show that movement players and activists in authoritarian states have agency, face dilemmas, and make strategic choices informed by their understanding of the situation and the adversaries they interact with.Peer reviewe

Resisting Redevelopment: Protest in Aspiring Global Cities. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2020. [Book review]

Non peer reviewe