As PI and individual researcher, I investigated the lived experience of middle classness in Bucharest and contraposed it to the postsocialist glorification of this class in public discourse.
In Romania, as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe, the notions of ‘middle class’ and ‘good life’ have become interchangeable. Related dialectically, each can be substituted for the other as a signifier of a field of aspirations and possibilities.
Membership in the middle class demands constant work, not only ‘boundary work’ to distinguish from the class Others, but also what I call ‘grounding work’ to profess the very existence of the middle class.
An article entitled Grounding work: Subjectification as middle class in postsocialist Romania is still in the making.
Other outcomes of this project can be accessed at
https://clasamijloc.wordpress.com
