Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working class and structures its relations with other social groups.

The puzzle that animates this thesis consists of a particular kind of populist politicisation of workers in Ukraine:the imperative of engagement in political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with ademobilising stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. In order to explain it, I ask how theUkrainian working class relates to the world of politics - both in the sense of objective relations mediated bysocial structures and mechanisms and in the sense of subjective attitude to the political domain. Thisethnographic exploration of the everyday politics of the workers focuses on the moral economy that constitutesthe class. The research is based on fieldwork conducted in the city of Kryvyi Rih between 2018 and 2021. Itconsisted of ethnographic interviews, participant observation at a factory, analysis of local press archives, anddigital ethnography. The analysis proceeds on multiple scales: from the political dynamics on the city level, itdescends to the level of workplace politics, and finally to individual strategies of economic survival andsymbolic distinction. I argue that the debilitating effect that the postsocialist socio-economic crisis had on theworkers' political agency was exacerbated by the paternalist mechanisms that emerged to attenuate the crisis.At the same time, the “oligarchic democracy” of the 2000s brought a polarisation along identitarian axes.These processes shaped the options of political participation available for workers: programmatic agonisticpolitics is discarded in favour of antagonistic vision that closes the political space and spawns lay technocraticprojects of authoritarian anti-corruption.

Industrial workers in Ukraine have a complex political lifeworld because their political action aimed at bringing radical social change coexists with a demobilizing stance that condemns all political participation as corrupt. This contradictory attitude to politics defines the character of populist mass mobilizations that shook Ukraine in 2004 and 2014, as well as the electoral overhaul of 2019 and the popular response to the Russian invasion in 2022. Based on three years of fieldwork in the city of Kryvyi Rih, the book focuses on the moral economy that constitutes the working class and structures its relations with other social groups.

An essential American dream—equal access to higher education—was becoming a reality with the GI Bill and civil rights movements after World War II. But this vital American promise has been broken. Christopher Newfield argues that the financial and political crises of public universities are not the result of economic downturns or of ultimately valuable restructuring, but of a conservative campaign to end public education’s democratizing influence on American society. Unmaking the Public University is the story of how conservatives have maligned and restructured public universities, deceiving the public to serve their own ends. It is a deep and revealing analysis that is long overdue. Newfield carefully describes how this campaign operated, using extensive research into public university archives. He launches the story with the expansive vision of an equitable and creative America that emerged from the post-war boom in college access, and traces the gradual emergence of the anti-egalitarian “corporate university,” practices that ranged from racial policies to research budgeting. Newfield shows that the culture wars have actually been an economic war that a conservative coalition in business, government, and academia have waged on that economically necessary but often independent group, the college-educated middle class. Newfield’s research exposes the crucial fact that the culture wars have functioned as a kind of neutron bomb, one that pulverizes the social and culture claims of college grads while leaving their technical expertise untouched. Unmaking the Public University incisively sets the record straight, describing a forty-year economic war waged on the college-educated public, and awakening us to a vision of social development shared by scientists and humanists alike.

Unmaking Imperial Russia examines Hrushevsky's construction of a new historical paradigm that brought about the nationalization of the Ukrainian past and established Ukrainian history as a separate field of study.