Dr Charles Walker

Charles joined St Antony's as a Junior Research Fellow in April 2007 after being appointed to a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Social Inequality in Eastern Europe by the Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies (CEELBAS), a consortium of the Universities of Oxford (REES), Birmingham (CREES) and London (UCL-SSEES).

Charles' appointment came shortly after the completion of his PhD at Birmingham's Centre for Russian and East European Studies, where he was also a Visiting Lecturer in the sociology of youth and the cultural politics of Russia. His PhD was a sociological investigation into processes of social stratification in the Russian education system and labour market, with a focus on young people training for industrial and agricultural employment at vocational colleges. As part of his Postdoctoral Fellowship, Charles is continuing his research on young people in Eastern Europe through a comparative study on social inequalities in the emerging education and labour markets of St Petersburg and Vilnius. Within this work, Charles' research interests include the operation of social capital (especially kinship networks), institutional change in approaches to education and employment, and more broadly, the applicability of contemporary social theory (particularly relating to globalisation and reflexive modernisation) in non-Western contexts.

Charles has published his work in a number of English and Russian-language journals and volumes, including recent articles in special issues of the International Journal of Human Resource Management and the International Journal of Lifelong Education. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his thesis, which is provisionally entitled Learning to Labour in post-Soviet Russia: Vocational Youth in Transition.

Email: charles.walker@sant.ox.ac.uk