A reminder of today’s talk by Hilary Pilkington, from 11:30am-1:00pm, AnSo 205:
The weight of the Vorkuta sky: Young people’s visual and verbal articulations of ‘place’
This paper is work in progress based on recently completed fieldwork in a deindustrialised city in the Russian far north undertaken under the auspices of a transnational European project on ‘Subcultures and Lifestyles’. It considers how a common structural constraint on young people – ‘place’ – impacts upon their visual and verbal articulation of their everyday regardless of (sub)cultural affiliation. The paper outlines key tropes of young people’s narratives about ‘place’, highlighting: the natural (landscape and territorial isolation); the social (Vorkuta’s emergence as a city through forced and temporary settlement); and the cultural (the heritage of prison camp and criminal gang culture). The paper pays attention to: the comparisons and contrasts between respondent and researcher representations of a particular urban space; the fusions and dissonances between the visual and the verbal articulations of place among respondents; and the changing representation of their engagement with urban space by respondents over a period of four years of research. Finally, the paper considers how young people engage reflexively with these verbal and visual representations of place through symbolic displays and performances of the ‘deviant’ heritage of the city.
Hilary Pilkington is a member of the Sociology department at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on the study of Russian society especially youth cultural practice, drug use, migration and displacement, ethnic and national identity including Muslim identity and the rise of xenophobic sentiments.
Books written or edited by Dr. Pilkington can be found in Koerner Library, including:
- Islam in post-Soviet Russia : public and private faces (ebook also available through UBC Library here)
- Migration, displacement, and identity in post-Soviet Russia (ebook also available, click here)
- Gender, generation and identity in contemporary Russia (ebook also available, click here)
- Russia’s youth and its culture : a nation’s constructors and constructed (ebook also available, click here)