Pioneers of gentrification: Women entrepreneurs prospecting in a post-Soviet industrial city

This peer-reviewed article is an ethnographic exploration of how working-class women, drawing on their gendered and class-based skills, demarcated a place for themselves in the post-Soviet settings of a coal-mining city and thus became the pioneers of gentrification. The paper demonstrates the limits of women’s self-employment activities in certain structural settings. In it, I also explore the prevailing narrative that emerges in the interviews: women’s sense of individual responsibility for their entrepreneurial failure, namely the eventual closure of their businesses 25 years ago. I analyse it against the narrative of systemic change, which persists in the interviews about the economic hardships of the 1990s.

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https://doi.org/10.1177/00961442231194105