Researching Lay Perceptions of Inequality through Images of Society: Compliance, Inversion and Subversion of Power Hierarchies.

This article examines how members of deindustrialising communities in Russia subjectively perceive social inequality and imagine society, using an innovative arts-informed method called the "drawing of society" within a multi-sited ethnography conducted in Moscow and Yekaterinburg. It finds that participants commonly envision Russian society as sharply divided between a small wealthy elite and a large poor majority, with working-class and middle-class individuals often locating themselves near the bottom of this hierarchy. The study identifies three narrative-visual strategies—compliance with, inversion of, and subversion of the established power hierarchy—that reflect varying moral and symbolic signifiers of inequality shaped by lived experiences, including ethnic and class tensions under Russia's neoliberal neo-authoritarian regime. This research contributes to understanding lay perceptions of inequality by integrating visual and narrative data to reveal the complex social imaginaries of post-industrial Russian communities.