Egor Muleev spent 3 weeks in February and March on a fieldwork in Ulyanovsk, Russia. There the trolleybus network development went hand in hand with construction of a huge aviation plant back in 1980-s. The initial plan was to try an experimental “bottom-up” fieldwork by working in a local trolleybus depot as a conductor.
Due to a positive test on Covid Egor was forced to think about other strategies. So a conservative interview-based approach was chosen. He intended to dedicate more than a month on it but suddenly the war started. He changed tickets and went back to Germany due to emerging uncertainties in relations between Russia and the European Union.
Nonetheless local architects and planners, officials as well as workers from the electrical public transport company took part in interviews. Also a local historian sold to Egor for 50 Euros almost 2 GB of archive data, photos and interviews with workers from an aviation plant on a topic of social policy in 1980-s. Unfortunately the standpoint of local activists and passengers was not covered and switched to an online mode. Anyway the amount of data seems like a sufficient enough for the first step on a way to complete a PhD dissertation.
