DPhil in Russian, University of Sussex (2003)
MA Literature, Culture & Modernity, Queen Mary, University of London (1997)
BA English, Education & Social Ethics, Lancaster University (1995)
Jeremy Morris is an Area-Studies specialist with extensive in-country experience and knowledge of contemporary Russia, having lived and worked there for many years in the 1990s.
Having written extensively on contemporary Russian literature and visual culture in the past, his current research is focused on ethnographic and interpretive approaches to understanding ‘actually lived experience’ in the former Soviet Union. This disciplinary shift towards Social and Cultural Anthropology is the logical extension of his long-standing in-country experience and close engagement with the Russia’s ‘everyday’ culture.
He has recently received research funding to investigate the negotiation of worker identity under post-socialism (British Academy).
This social and cultural anthropological research addresses two key debates in social research and area studies. It evaluates the transformative power of neoliberalism on the public and private identities of workers and helps theorise this experience within the context of post-socialism and globalisation.
In addition, Jeremy acted as Director of Undergraduate Programmes in Russian within CREES for five years from 2005-2010, completely overhauling undergraduate language provision, with support from a dedicated team of language-teaching professionals, making Birmingham one of the best places in the UK for students to attain all-round fluency in Russian. The programme tutors pride themselves in providing a highly demanding and satisfying student-centred learning experience, and are nationally acknowledged as providing the benchmark in virtual learning environment support. The team have received significant funding from CEELBAS (Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies) to undertake post-graduate curriculum development and training courses that are VLE-based and can be adapted to different HE institutions’ requirements.
Tom Disney (2011-) Orphan Care and Imprisonment in the Russian Federation. This research will bring together the sub-disciplines of Children’s Geographies and Geographies of Health and Care to examine the ways in which orphaned children display agency within these spaces of institutional care, and the ways in which these spaces are socially and culturally constructed by the adults providing the care and the children as recipients of that care.
John Kennedy (2012-) How do Russian communities develop social resilience to modern industrial risks. Interdisciplinary empirical social research is required to describe and explain Russian responses (resilience) to industrial risks in the context of post-socialist change. This will determine how Russian attitudes and behaviour can be situated in existing sociologies of risk and to whether these theories require re-evaluation to encompass a wider variety of reflexive experience to modernity. It is questionable whether concepts of risk and resilience grounded in Western experience are fully applicable to the Russia, despite comparable conditions of industrial danger. In turn the specificity of ‘modernity’ in Russia may explain resilience in the social and economic context of post-socialism. It is also necessary to focus on the social consequences of risk in Russia, which, given its unique social and economic experience, may serve to empirically re-evaluate the importance of social embeddedness to theoretical notions of global ‘risk society’ (Atkinson, 2007).
(ed., with A. Polese) Informal economies in post-socialist spaces: between illegality and embeddedness (Routledge, 2013)
Mastering Chaos: The Metafictional Worlds of Evgeny Popov (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2012), in press.
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Special Issues of Journals
(ed. with N. Rulyova and V. Strukov) (2012) Special Issue: New Media in New Europe Asia, Europe-Asia Studies 64(8).
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Recent and Forthcoming Peer-reviewed Journal articles
(with A. Polese) '"Doing well while doing good?" Informal Health and Education Sector Payments in Russian and Ukrainian Cities', European Urban and Regional Studies, (forthcoming 2013).
'Low Wages and No Dignity: Russian Workers Reflect on the Stark Post-Soviet Choices in Blue-collar Employment', International Labor and Working-class History 83 (2013).
‘Unruly Entrepreneurs: Russian Worker Responses to Insecure Formal Employment', Global Labour Journal 3.2 (2012).
‘Beyond Coping: Alternatives to Consumption Within Russian Worker Networks’, Ethnography (13)4 (2012).
‘Learning how to shoot fish on the internet: new media in the Russian margins as facilitating immediate and parochial social needs’, Europe-Asia Studies 64(8) (2012), 1546-64.
‘Introduction: New Media in New Europe-Asia’, Europe-Asia Studies 64(8) (2012), 1349-55.
'“Independent learning? I came to this university to be taught Russian.” – reporting on a VLE-based project to support self-study,' Rusistika 37 (2012).
‘Socially Embedded Workers at the Nexus of Diverse Work in Russia: An Ethnography of Blue-Collar Informalization’, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 31:11-12 (2011), 619-631.
‘The Empire Strikes Back: Projections of National Identity in Contemporary Russian Advertising’, Russian Review, 64, (2005), 642-660. (This article, which analyses such diverse phenomena as commodity fetishism, nationalism and masculinity in the post socialist context, was one of the top-10 cited articles for 2000-2010.)
‘Elevating Verka Serdiuchka: A Star-Study in Excess Performativity’ in, eds. H. Goscilo, V. Strukov, Glamour and Celebrity in Post-Soviet Russian Culture, (Routledge 2010).
‘Drinking to the Nation: Russian Television Advertising and Cultural Differentiation’, In, Globalisation, Freedom and the Media after Communism, eds. Birgit Beumers, Stephen Hutchings and Natalia Rulyova. (Routledge, 2009), 141-158.