Doctoral Dissertation Research; "The Post Soviet Family: Boundaries in Transition

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This largely ethnographic doctoral dissertation project explores how the borders between state, civic society, and families are being renegotiated in terms of who should provide resources for children in a decade of socio-economic upheaval. The project also examines parental gender roles within the family and how changes in the public roles of men and women affect mothering and fathering. How do parents negotiate their roles as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, and what do they perceive their responsibilities to their children to be in a fast-changing society no longer dominated by a heavy-handed paternalistic state? How do parents interact with the more public sphere (schools, government agencies, community organizations, etc.) and how do they experience changing national family-related policies? Although researchers are actively exploring the experiences of women in the new post-Soviet era, very little attention is being focused on men, or on the family as a unit in the independent Russia of the l990s. This dissertation fills a significant gap in the literature on the post-Soviet world and contributes to larger theoretical debates on state-family relations, civil society building, and to comparative perspectives on family and gender. Material for this dissertation comes from eight months of in-depth interviewing and participant observation with twenty families living in the city of Saratov, Russia.