Charles Walker

This book explores the changing nature of growing-up working-class in post-Soviet Russia, a country dislocated by the experience of neo-liberal economic reform. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a provincial Russian region, it follows the experiences of vocational education graduates whose colleges continue to channel them into the ailing industrial and agricultural sectors. Rather than settling for transitions into ‘poor work’, the book shows how these young men and women develop a range of strategies aimed at overcoming the poverty of opportunity available to them in traditional enterprises, pursuing instead emerging opportunities in higher education, jobs in the new service sector and the prospect of migration. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Charles Walker analyses these strategies and their significance for wider processes of social change and social stratification in post-Soviet Russia.

This book explores the changing nature of growing-up working-class in post-Soviet Russia, a country dislocated by the experience of neo-liberal economic reform. Based on extensive ethnographic research in a provincial Russian region, it follows the experiences of vocational education graduates whose colleges continue to channel them into the ailing industrial and agricultural sectors. Rather than settling for transitions into ‘poor work’, the book shows how these young men and women develop a range of strategies aimed at overcoming the poverty of opportunity available to them in traditional enterprises, pursuing instead emerging opportunities in higher education, jobs in the new service sector and the prospect of migration. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives, Charles Walker analyses these strategies and their significance for wider processes of social change and social stratification in post-Soviet Russia.

A novel of survival against adversity, of friendship between different worlds and a fight for justice. Jade Viljoen spent the first fourteen years of her life on the edge of the Kalahari Desert, loving the freedom that it offered. Then fate moved to abandon her in its harsh interior and she found herself fighting for her life in the place she loved. She could rely on only one thing. A friend who knew better than her how to kill to live, how to hide to survive and how to master the desert. A friend who started life as a vulnerable cub in a family of leopards and now partners her as one of the ultimate predators. The two forge an alliance of necessity. Until the outside world intervenes .. Place of Dry Water is a desert thriller, immersing you totally in its unique environment, while the plot twists and turns in the heat of the Kalahari.