ABSTRACT
This chapter draws upon recent work in the sociology of class and mobility, the anthropology of cultural change, and human geography to analyse the ways in which individual experiences of achieving a class position relate to the aggregate processes of socio-cultural change. It examines this by looking at how college-educated young people in Russia discuss and interpret these processes. The chapter then presents how their interpretations are 'scaled', and whether global influences as well as individual and collective identities are in harmony or in conflict with one another. It explores how a growing cosmopolitan consciousness affects the understandings of one's class position amongst the young. Class differences emerge from the socio-economic power structures within society and beyond it. The chapter then examines the recent discussions of the connections between globalisation, youth and class. In Russia, the fundamental exploitative and in-egalitarian nature of capitalism made itself visible following the demise of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
