University of Manchester

What shapes people’s everyday understandings of inequality? This course looks at how everyday views or framings of inequality emerge. The course examines how troubling social situations come to be regarded as inequalities, and how inequalities come to be seen as susceptible to intervention and change. The course explores people’s sense of inequality’ through their attitudes and perceptions, reflexive and self-conscious values and beliefs, expressions of injustice and indignity, struggles against inequality through organized protest, resistance and mundane non-compliance, but also through the more tacit, embodied, and affective ways in which people know and sense the world.

This course introduces students to the study of Russia from a variety of different perspectives (e.g. historical, cultural, social and political). The course is structured around a series of pivotal events that have shaped Russia’s development from the reign of Peter the Great (1682-1725) to the reign of Nicholas II (1894-1917). Each event is examined in its appropriate historical context, through documentary evidence, cultural artefacts and contemporary debates, as well as through scholarly works.