Reshaping Inequalities, "Reassembling Selves'': Community Transformations and Narrative Identities of Former Factory Workers in Siberian Industrial Town

The paper focuses on the transformation of communities and emerging new inequalities in an industrial town of South-Western Siberia, Russia. 

The large-scale crisis of tree town-forming enterprises in mid-1990s, accompanied with dispossession, large-scale poverty and massive unemployment, resulted in the erosion of communities due to disappearance of the organizing role of work and labor, decline of the structured leisure, erosion of factory communities, individualization and fragmentation of life paths accompanied with the feelings of insecurity and uncertainty. 

The economy and community life in town was almost "rebuilt from scratch". Currently the economic consequences of the crisis are mainly over, but not the transformation of inequalities or emergence of new communities and subjectivities. Basing on the analysis of interview transcripts (91 interviews collected in town in 2007-2008), the paper contributes to the study of new subjectivities including, but not limited to, class-based ones.

The transformations of subjectivities are traced on the basis of the narratives of “coming back to life” (life trajectories and their interpretations) after the collapse of factories, which are told by former factory workers more than 10 years after the collapse. The decision to focus on people working for the three factories is based on a suggestion that the experience of living and working in shared environment, community building, and loss of both, constitutes a relational setting which shapes the repertoire of events and justifications used for making sense of common past, multiple present, and diverse visions of the future.

"Narrative identity" is understood as a performing subjectivity creating and maintaining an individual's permanence in time and space. The research shows how the new "modes of permanence" emerge after the collapse of "factory-based" ones, focussing on materialities and moralities as building bricks for new subjectivities and communities in town.

See more of: Story Telling the Crisis: The Social Narration of the Contemporary Inequalities
See more of: RC14 Sociology of Communication, Knowledge and Culture
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