Deaf Youth in Contemporary Russia: Barriers to Inclusion in Education and the Labour Market

Abstract This essay explores the changing shape of transitions from education to employment amongst deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHOH) youth in Russia. It draws on survey and interview data to show that, despite the formal institution of inclusive policies and legal frameworks at the state level, the choices open to DHOH youth remain heavily limited, and become narrower at each stage of their transitions to adulthood. This narrowing of horizons and attendant marginalisation stems from the ongoing salience of disabling, medical approaches to deafness; a lack of enabling practices or resources to support DHOH youth in the education system; and widespread discrimination from employers.

THE SHAPE OF YOUNG PEOPLE'S TRANSITIONS FROM THE education system into employment across the industrialised world has undergone radical changes in recent decades (Furlong & Cartmel 2007;Walker & Stephenson 2012;O'Reilly et al. 2019). As well as spending longer in education, young people often undergo prolonged periods in marginal forms of employment before reaching a position of stability in the labour market, as precarious under-employment has become the norm for school and college leavers (MacDonald 2016). The way in which these prolonged and complex transitions are experienced has also transformed, as the disciplinary mode of governmentality at the heart of both Fordist and state socialist societies has given way to one based on responsibilisation and individualisation (Fraser 2003). In this context, young people have a much greater range of choices in the pathways they take, but responsibility for these choices has shifted decisively to young people themselves, while their rights-to free education, an expectation of inclusion in the labour market, and forms of welfare such as social housing and other benefits-have correspondingly diminished (Mizen 2002). Young people with disabilities-including young people who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHOH), 1 the subject of this essay-occupy an ambiguous position within this picture. While in many parts of the world the shift from medical to social understandings of disability has underpinned growing recognition of the rights of the disabled (Lane 2002), young people with disabilities are positioned as an 'at risk' group whose lives continue to be marked by a chronic lack of choice (Shah 2008). Alongside other risk groups, such as young people leaving care, disabled youth continue to be recipients of welfare, but the form that this takes can be highly limited and limiting (Verlage et al. 2020). In a context in which young people must now equip themselves with the skills, competencies and qualifications to navigate their way through non-standardised, non-linear routes into careers, young people with disabilities are thus potentially at even greater risk of marginalisation.
This essay addresses the changing shape of transition into employment and the related experiences of social inclusion and exclusion amongst young people who are DHOH in contemporary Russia. During the Soviet period, like other young people classed as disabled, the lives and prospects of deaf youth were heavily shaped by the classification of their disability, which determined what and where they could study and the forms of employment they could take up. Nevertheless, the deaf community, represented by the All-Russian Society of the Deaf (Vserossiiskoe Obshchestvo Glukhikh-VOG), was far more successful than most other disabled groups in achieving high levels of social inclusion through education and work, with the emergence of a wide range of educational establishments and industrial enterprises for the deaf. This began as early as the 1920s, with the People's Commissariat of Social Security organising vocational training for the deaf, after which educational facilities were set up in factories and plants to combat illiteracy (Bazoev 1999;Bazoev & Palennyi 2002). By 1970 83.4% of deaf people over the age of 15 were engaged in 'socially useful labour' in industry or agriculture, or were in education (Shaw 2017, p. 142). As Shaw (2017) argues, the deaf were able to utilise Soviet values as a vehicle for this social inclusion, their embrace of hard work and a commitment to the construction of socialism proving that their disability did not limit their capacity to be active contributors to Soviet society. Nevertheless, the educational careers and working lives of the deaf largely took place away from wider Soviet society, with relatively little integration into the hearing world. In turn, this separation meant that the deaf were never able to overcome the Soviet ideological view of deafness as an abnormality and thus a disqualification from full integration into the cultural life of the USSR (Shaw 2017).
The post-Soviet period has seemingly presented deaf youth and young people with other disabilities with the possibility of more diverse and meaningful forms of social inclusion, as Russia appears to be following developments in the Western world in pursuing policies that 1 In translating the Russian terms glukhoi and slaboslyshashchii (literally 'deaf 'and 'weak-hearing') the authors follow the guidance of the National Association of the Deaf (US) in the use of 'deaf and hard-ofhearing', which are preferred to 'hearing-impaired' by many in the deaf community. 'Community and Culture: FAQs', National Association of the Deaf, available at: https://www.nad.org/resources/americansign-language/community-and-culture-frequently-asked-questions/, accessed 28 June 2021. At the same time, we do not use the capitalised D adopted by deaf communities in many Western countries as this has not been adopted in Russia. This simply reflects the use of lower-case letters in all proper adjectives in Russian, which depoliticises what has been a matter of linguistic recognition in English-speaking countries. are rooted in a social rather than medical model of disability (Lane 2002). 2 This change was signalled by the signing of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2008 and its ratification in 2012, and best exemplified by attempts to foster an inclusive education system in which disabled and able-bodied children are taught side-by-side, as set out in the 2012 Education Reform. 3 The need for this reform was clear: the limitations of the education available in rehabilitative (formerly korrektsionye, now spetsialnye) schools have long been manifested in poor educational and employment outcomes amongst disabled youth as a whole (Banning-Lover 2016). However, whether this reform and the commitments behind it have really improved the prospects for integrating young people with disabilities is unclear. The sudden closure of many rehabilitative schools and classes for children with physical limitations (ogranichennie vozmozhnosti zdorov'ya) caused alarm amongst activists, who were concerned that the mainstream education system was ill-equipped for the transition set out in the reform, which was subsequently watered down to allow parents to choose either inclusive or special schools (Boitsov 2013;Lemutkina 2015). 4 Similarly problematic has been the legal framework governing the forms of employment young people with disabilities are allowed to take up, as recent reforms appear to have deepened the limitations already in place since the Soviet period. 5 More broadly, although there have been improvements in the rights of young people with disabilities-to education, healthcare, equal pay and other benefits-in practice the legal implementation of these rights has been lacking (Romanov & Iarskaia-Smirnova 2008;Dimenshtein & Larikova 2009;Fröhlich 2012). In the employment sphere, for example, there is widespread discrimination against the disabled, with the employment gap between able-bodied and disabled people in Russia higher than anywhere else in the world at 52.7% according to ILO data (Banning-Lover 2016).
With regard to the prospects of young people who are DHOH, the significance of the educational reform and the shift towards a social model of disability more broadly lies in 2 Although the Soviet model of disability has been described as 'functional' rather than 'medical' (Tarasenko 2010), like the 'rehabilitative' model (Saxton & Kaplan 1999), it is very close to the latter in that it conceptualises disability as an impairment or deficit which limits a person's ability to perform functional activities. Reflecting these similarities, many researchers imply the mixed nature of all three when speaking about the medical model (Tarasenko 2010 expanding the range of choice available to a group that has historically been relatively wellintegrated into both education and employment, in contrast to other disabled groups, many of whom were simply institutionalised (Rassell & Iarskaia-Smirnova 2013). Within the secondary vocational education system, for example, DHOH children are de jure entitled to choose from a range of 333 different professions recommended by the Russian Ministry of Labour, 6 but according to data from the VOG, in 2016 only 74 specialties were de facto available. The state programme Accessible Environment (Dostupnaya Sreda) that ran from 2011 to 2020 included sections on the vocational education of people with hearing impairments, intending to broaden this base through the translation of existing programmes into sign language, amongst other adaptations. 7 While such programmes have brought positive changes in the availability of vocational education for the deaf over recent years, as will be discussed below, the secondary vocational pathway is itself problematic in terms of the employment opportunities it offers young people, as well as the prospect of continuing through to higher education. As Walker (2011) argues, this educational pathway has come to be associated with low-wage, low-prestige jobs in the industrial and agricultural sectors, and where provision has shifted towards more popular service sector professions, there is often limited correspondence to the needs of local labour markets (Walker 2010). Nevertheless, vocational colleges dominate as an educational destination for DHOH youth, with 61% of those enrolled in an educational institution in 2015 studying in this sector (Minobrnauki 2015), compared with only 14% of the hearing population, which overwhelmingly chooses higher education (Borodina et al. 2017). As vocational colleges are their primary educational pathway, the essay will explore the educational and employment prospects of DHOH youth transitioning through these colleges, charting their experiences from school, through choice of profession and further education, and entry into the labour market.
the ways choices appear to them. Such horizons are thus framed by objective, external opportunity structures and by subjectivities rooted in cultural dispositions, both of which reflect a young person's social location (in terms of class, gender, dis/ability, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, region or locality), and combine to mould their perceptions of available choices. As such, rather than the economic rationality that frames policy documents and discourses, young people's choice-making through transitions into adulthood is shaped by a pragmatic rationality, reflecting considerations of what might be possible and 'appropriate' for them. The careership model has been fruitfully applied in studies of youth transitions to adulthood in multiple cultural contexts, including Russia (Walker 2011), Japan (Okano 2009), Sweden (Hultgren 2009) and Finland (Rinne et al. 2020), and amongst young people with a range of disabilities (Dee 2006;Shah 2008). In her study of young people with disabilities in the UK, for example, Shah (2008) finds that the truncated curricula of special schools limit the possibility of her respondents developing aspirations to pursue certain careers. More broadly, reflecting the cultural shift towards a social model of disability, she finds that all of her respondents aspire to build independent futures for themselves. Despite this shift, however, the trajectories of young disabled people remain 'scattered with obstacles and discrimination, thus putting them at a substantial disadvantage in relation to their non-disabled peers' (Shah 2008, p. 45).

Methodology
The essay is based on research that adopted a mixed-methods approach, combining a quantitative survey with in-depth, biographical interviews. Its primary research question was, what factors shape occupational choice and professional adaptation amongst DHOH youth in Russia? Research involving DHOH people has historically been rooted in a positivist epistemology and favoured scientific, quantitative methods, reflecting the dominance of the medical model of disability and its positioning of the disabled subject as an object in need of medical attention (Davis 1995). With the advent of the social model of disability, whose aim has been 'to provide insights into the disabling tendencies of modern society in order to generate policies and practices to facilitate their eradication' (Barnes 2012, p. 18), such approaches have increasingly given way to methodologies rooted in an interpretivist epistemology that enable researchers to access the voices and thus the experiences of people with disabilities (Wilson & Winiarczyk 2014). Qualitative methodologies are also better attuned to appreciating that, while impersonal, quantitative approaches may position the deaf simply as 'those who don't hear', deaf communities are composed of individuals 'who identify themselves as a minority group with their own unique language and culture, and set of values, customs, attitudes, and experiences that differ from those who hear' (McKee et al. 2012). According to Holcomb (2010), understanding the deaf perception and experience of the world calls for a deaf epistemology in which personal accounts and testimonies are prioritised and promoted in understandings of what counts as knowledge about deafness. While there is thus a clear need to prioritise a qualitative methodology, the research recognised the enhanced ability of a mixed-methods approach to illuminate the breadth and depth of the inequities faced by DHOH youth in accessing the services they need (Mertens 2013). In the Russian case, the need to gather survey data is especially acute since existing statistical data concerning the disabled severely lack transparency (Burdyak et al. 2017)-they are rarely separated by their disability classification and thus presented as a single set-while reliable statistics on the numbers of deaf people in Russia and on their employment and educational profiles are simply lacking (Dem'yanova & Ryzhikova 2017). The survey was conducted over a period of six months in 2017 and involved a total of 187 respondents between the ages of 16 and 30 years, 63% of whom were men and 37% women. Fifty-nine percent of respondents described themselves as deaf, and 41% as hard-of-hearing. Ninety-three percent knew sign language and used it for communication, and almost all used hearing aids at least some of the time. The respondents were situated in 17 different locations across the Russian Federation, including large cities such as Moscow and St Petersburg, medium-sized cities such as Perm and Samara, and smaller towns and villages. Preparation for the survey began with the acquisition of a list of educational institutions in which DHOH people study from the VOG, after which college heads were contacted and asked to facilitate the study. Each college then conducted a survey of all DHOH students present on that day. To extend the coverage of the survey, respondents were snowballed through friends and acquaintances of the researchers. The respondents in the sample had come from a range of educational backgrounds. Sixty-two percent had attended a school exclusively for deaf children and 32% a school for the hard-of-hearing, 9 while only 5% had attended an inclusive, mixed school, and 1% were home schooled. Reflecting the geographical dispersion of schools for DHOH children and thus the need to relocate in order to attend them, 82% of the respondents had boarded in an internat (boarding school) school at some point during their education. Respondents were enrolled in, or had already completed their training in, a number of trades preparing them for employment in the manufacturing and service sectors, of which the most popular were car mechanic, jewellery design, fashion design, lathe operator, baker and confectioner, computing and plumbing.
The results of the survey helped to shape the choice of respondents approached for the qualitative stage of the research, who were selected to reflect the range of educational backgrounds and professional training being undertaken, as well as their average age, with most interviewees aged between 17 and 20. Interviews were conducted with respondents in Moscow in person, while those in other locations-Kazan, Yaroslavl', Perm and Stavropol-were carried out using video communications programmes and messengers (Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber). Interviews were conducted in an oral-visual form with the participation of a professional sign language interpreter, who was employed despite the researchers knowing sign language themselves in order to maximise understanding. In addition to 17 biographical interviews, seven expert interviews were conducted with specialists in the field of vocational education for DHOH: teachers and interpreters in an inclusive college; NGO specialists assisting in the employment of people with disabilities; teachers at special schools; the manager of a public organisation; and a departmental head at a scientific institution engaged in the development of professional education. Information about all of the interviews is provided in the Appendix.

From school to college: narrowing horizons for action
According to the survey data, the majority of DHOH young people in vocational colleges share similar socio-economic characteristics to hearing young people in these institutions. Both hearing and DHOH youth in kolledzhy-the dominant form of vocational college since the absorbing of profuchilishcha into the secondary vocational system (Walker 2015)-are from backgrounds in which parents are occupied in manual and clerical rather than managerial and professional-level work, and thus lack high value forms of cultural capital (Walker 2011) that might have guided them directly from school into higher rather than vocational education. Pathways into vocational colleges are further cemented for DHOH youth by institutional factors earlier in their educational careers shaping the vocational track as the only realistic option open to them. In our survey, more than 90% of respondents had studied in special schools for children with hearing impairments, many of which maintain formal partnerships with particular vocational colleges with which they hold long associations, often dating back to the Soviet period. In such cases, respondents perceived this formal trajectory as the only one available to them, feeling that they had had little choice in determining their next steps after leaving school and instead, deferring to their teachers: I can't say why I'm studying here. I didn't choose myself. My teacher decided that I would study this specialty. She just told me. I didn't think about it. You need to ask her why. 10 Thus, in contrast to hearing students at secondary vocational colleges, who construct the vocational track as a preferable alternative to continuing straight into higher education (Walker 2010(Walker , 2011, DHOH youth in specialised schools in many cases do not even perceive university as a possibility, assuming it to be a route that is unavailable to them, a perception that might be explained by the low legal literacy of young people with disabilities (Chadova et al. 2012, p. 147): NB: Why didn't you want to get higher education? Respondent: Is it really possible for the deaf to study at an institute? I think it isn't. It's not allowed. 11 In terms of careership, then, in such cases the institutional structures of DHOH young people's schooling act to position higher education outside of their horizons for action. In addition, the generally low level of education DHOH youth receive in special schools places additional barriers to them perceiving anything other than vocational education as a possibility. Respondents themselves were conscious of a gulf in quality between specialised schools for the deaf and ordinary state schools for hearing youth but felt that studying in what some referred to as 'normal' (normal'nie) schools was also not an option, despite the changes ushered in by the 2012 educational reform. As will be discussed further below in relation to the vocational colleges themselves, many respondents felt that general schools would not have the facilities to cater for their needs, such that de facto segregation at the school level remained. I passed the algebra exam only thanks to my mother [a teacher in a regular school], who told me to go to a hearing school to be taught. I myself noticed that in hearing schools algebra is taught really well and is understandable, but in schools for the deaf they are somehow not taught in the same way. I gave my teachers advice on how it would be better to teach it, but nothing worked. In the hearing school, these were individual lessons that they wrote specially for me … . [But] in ordinary lessons with other hearing children, it is impossible for me to understand anything. 12 While respondents' horizons for action were thus limited in a number of ways by structural and institutional factors within the specialised and ordinary school systems, they were also significantly shaped by cultural factors underpinning their subjective perceptions not only of what was possible, but of what was preferable as young people who were DHOH. The impact of the respondents' experience of deafness was especially clear in the prominent role of peers in shaping their preferences, a tendency augmented by the fact that the majority had spent long periods in boarding schools. Reflecting this, many of our respondents reported that deaf peers acted as a guide when deciding on which college to attend and the particular subject they would study, with one quarter of respondents reporting that they chose their college based on the fact that their friends and acquaintances studied or planned to study there. These considerations reflect the importance to DHOH youth of maintaining a social environment that is familiar to them, that they know will accommodate them, and that, above all, they can identify with. Indeed, in Russia, as elsewhere in the world, the importance of deaf identity and culture was illustrated in response to the emergence of cochlear implantation as a 'cure' for deafness in the 1990s (Tavartkiladze 2017), which was received with similar ambivalence (Mauldin 2016). As Sutton-Spence (2010) argues, the socialisation of deaf children from hearing families into the deaf community is central to the development of deaf identity, and this process hinges on their exposure to signed storytelling as a form of acculturation. 13 Since this rarely takes place within the hearing family, the role of signing teachers and of peers and friends who sign is paramount for DHOH children, and it is partly this that explains why only 5% of our sample had attended an inclusive school rather than a specialised school. In making transitions into further education, peers continue to play a central role in our respondents' plans as they aimed to preserve their social and communicative environment. Katya, for example, said that she chose a college where many deaf people study because she wanted to be able to receive information from those around her, arguing that maintaining relations with other deaf was a driving motive for her and her friends: 'Many deaf people study there, because people in the deaf world have close ties'. 14 12 Tanya, 23 years old, Moscow, 12 August 2017. 13 See also Young and Temple (2014). 14 Katya, 20 years old, Moscow, 24 August 2017.
Other respondents pointed out the difficulties they would face in communicating with hearing people: Yes, it's more interesting with the deaf and I can find a common language. With hearing people I don't know how to make contact and don't really communicate well, and I don't feel comfortable, because I cannot hear them. 15 The centrality of peers to the respondents' horizons for action thus underlines Hodkinson and Sparkes' argument that, rather than being technical decisions based on rational calculations about employment, 'career decisions can only be understood in terms of the life histories of those who make them, wherein identity has evolved through interaction with significant others and with the culture in which the subject has lived and is living' (Hodkinson & Sparkes 1997, p. 33).
While the broad choice of vocational education thus stemmed at least as much from the cultural imperatives of DHOH youth as it did from structural constraints upon them, as they progressed down this pathway the respondents faced more and more constraints, which at every step further narrowed their options. One new barrier placed in front of DHOH youth is the requirement for them to compete with their hearing peers for places in colleges, as the 2012 Education Reform removed the obligation of vocational colleges to grant them access 'without competition', a move which has effectively limited the range both of colleges and of specific professions open to DHOH youth. While there are still provisions for young people with different capabilities-for example, the law stipulates that entrance examinations should be organised 'taking into account the psychophysical characteristics of development, individual capabilities, and health status' of applicants (Minobrnauki 2014)-graduates of rehabilitative schools are unlikely to be able to perform tasks on a par with hearing youth who have attended general schools, even in specially created conditions: We have cancelled preferential admission for the deaf here, and they go to college on a general basis. Our director decided that the groups will be included with the hearing-capable students. And that's why everyone is acting on a common basis. 16 A further narrowing of available professions was threatened by an order adopted by the Ministry of Health and Social Development in 2011, 17 which deprived hearingimpaired people of the opportunity to work in professions such as lathe operator, general machine tool operator, installer/fitter and milling machine operator, all of which have 15 Lena, 20 years old, Moscow, 12 October 2017. 16 Teacher and translator at an inclusive college, Moscow, 26 October 2017. 17 Prikaz Minzdravsotsrazvitiya RF Ob utverzhdenii perechnei vrednykh i (ili) opasnykh proizvodstvennykh faktorov i rabot, pri vypolnenii kotorykh provodyatsya obyazatelnye predvaritelnye i periodicheskie meditsinskie osmotry (obsledovaniya), i Poryadka provedeniya obyazatelnykh predvaritel'nykh i periodicheskikh meditsinskikh osmotrov (obsledovanii) rabotnikov, zanyatykh na tyazhelykh rabotakh i na rabotakh s vrednymi i (ili) opasnymi usloviyami truda № 302n ot 12.04.2011 (Moscow, Ministry of Health and Social Development). been popular amongst the deaf since the Soviet period. The order prompted several years of the deaf community advocating for their legal right to continue working in these professions, and in 2014 a number of medical contraindications and restrictions for the employment of the deaf were removed. 18 Nevertheless, access to a wide range of professions that DHOH youth are legally entitled to work in continues to be limited informally, as colleges simply fail to provide the necessary support structures to make them available. College staff point out that it is impractical and irrational to hire an interpreter for the sake of one or a few students and instead, channel deaf students onto the same programme: By law we don't have the right to refuse to enrol them. Like, if they come to us and apply to enrol, we're obliged to take them … but here the situation is that, if we have one person, then because of him we have to employ a translator … . So we reorient [pereorientiruem] them to a trade where there's a translator. 19 In addition to the limitations placed on occupational choice by competitive college entry and the failure of colleges to make subjects taught to hearing students accessible, DHOH students all face a limitation of choice at the individual level connected with their 'individual programme of rehabilitation and/or habilitation' (IPRH, previously IPR), which is issued by the Bureau of Medical and Social Expertise (MSE) following a clinical and psychological examination. The IPRH has its roots in the 1960s and 1970s, a period that saw a 'scientification' of the treatment of deafness by the Soviet ministries of education and health, which set up medical-pedagogical commissions (medikopedagogicheskie komissii) to determine suitable educational pathways for individual DHOH children, and the Ministry of Social Welfare, which established a definitive list of jobs deemed appropriate for the deaf through the Central Institute for the Examination of Work-Capability and the Organisation of Labour for Disabled People (Tsentral'nyi nauchno-issledovatel'skii institut ekspertisy trudosposobnosti i organizatsii truda invalidov) (Shaw 2017, pp. 194-95). These models and processes may be seen as the administrative embodiment of the medical model of disability, whose institution led to a parallel diminution in the agency of deaf people and the deaf community in determining their own lives at a time when other social groups were finding new forms of independence (Shaw 2017, pp. 194-95).
re/habilitation and sanatorium treatments, as well as a social re/habilitation programme (providing legal assistance, socio-cultural and psychological support) and pedagogical re/habilitation for children under 18 years old. In addition, the IPRH also contains a section on 'professional rehabilitation', which, in addition to information about vocational training and retraining opportunities and assistance with job placements and adaptation, includes recommendations about the types of work and labour functions that the individual concerned may have difficulty in performing. While MSE specialists make their recommendations according to formal schemas rooted in existing legislation, this system appears to be open to wide divergence in diagnoses by the specialists themselves, which can have a catastrophic impact on educational and occupational opportunities. If the IPRH states, for example, that a person with a disability may have communication difficulties or may require special working conditions (such as a low-noise environment), then a long list of possible professions will be closed off, and employers are obliged by law to comply with these recommendations. According to our respondents, there were even cases where, without a client's consent, a doctor had entered specific occupations into the professional training field, thereby suggesting to future educators and employers that these were the only types of work they could engage in. One of our informants from Yaroslavl' told us about how she had managed to overcome the limitations of her diagnosis, echoing Soviet-era accounts of similar struggles (Krainin & Krainina 1984): After school I wanted to go to a technical school to improve my qualifications, but before the medical board did not give permission to study, since I'm classified as being in the third disability group. It's not allowed to have this profession according to their guidelines … . Despite this, though, I still pursued this profession with the help of training that my employer paid for. This is how I became a professional sewing machinist. Yes, it was a difficult period at that time! 20 The bureaucratic process surrounding the IPRH also poses problems for DHOH, as it is a time-consuming procedure involving many official documents, but one that they must go through in order to enter any educational institution beyond their rehabilitative school. In cases where DHOH young people do not manage to get through the process in time, they must wait until the next year. Indeed, one education professional even indicated that colleges use this red tape to deter DHOH young people from applying to them: If they came to us and apply then we have to enrol them, but of course we demand a whole package of documents: certificate of disability, the IPRH, etc. 21 Other problems emerge for DHOH youth due to the need to study in the location in which they are registered, which can pose a significant barrier to educational mobility and thus, given the unevenness of resources and provisions not only across Russia's regions but within its major urban areas, a further narrowing of life chances. One respondent who used to live in Samara, for example, had wanted to study bookkeeping at a college in Moscow, which, alongside other major cities, has far more opportunities than smaller towns and more distant regions: In ninth grade, I wanted to study to be a bookkeeper. I really had no desire to stay in school, and I began to look at various colleges for accountants, but registration was required there. And I didn't have it at that moment. So I was left with no choice. 22 In this way, alongside the shortcomings of the Educational Reform of 2012 and the manner in which it has been implemented, institutional structures and forms of governmentality that have their roots in the Soviet period continue to pose a range of barriers to inclusion for DHOH youth leaving school. Once DHOH students have gained entry to a vocational college, further barriers emerge in relation to the lack of adequate provision for the pedagogical frameworks necessary for deaf education. In particular, the need for qualified interpretation of educational material into sign language to supplement oral speech is vital if students with hearing impairments are to be fully engaged in their education and training (Varinova & Traulko 2011). However, while all educational institutions in Russia are legally obliged to provide interpretation services, in reality many colleges lack the financial capability to have an interpreter on their staff, or they employ cheaper, unqualified interpreters (Varinova 2017, p. 16). As noted above, even where colleges have an interpreter, they do not have the capacity to extend translation into sign language effectively across more than one professional grouping. Where DHOH students resist being grouped into one occupation and study in different groups, sign language provision cannot cover all classes, and according to our respondents, there are cases of students themselves finding interpreters to fill the gaps. Naturally these interpreters are not trained to understand the educational material they are translating, resulting in a dilution of any technical or specialist content. Teaching staff also attempt to help DHOH students to bridge the gap in communication, especially in regard to lectures, which are especially difficult for them to understand without signing. However, it is clear that inadequacies of provision decrease the quality of the training they receive, while increasing the workload on students themselves: Sometimes teachers try to help, but they also don't know how. They send presentations, but not everything there is clear. I tried to ask for clarification, but the teacher can't explain a whole lecture to me alone, so that it's one to one and I understand everything. You have to look for a way around it or get used to it. 23 In situations where students are unable to engage with the teaching process or teaching materials because of the lack of enabling measures, the most highly motivated among them look for accessible materials on their own (online, for example) or ask classmates for help. In other cases, teachers tacitly exclude DHOH students by informally 22 Tanya, 23 years old, Moscow, 12 August 2017. 23 Dima, 17 years old, Moscow, 16 January 2018. reducing requirements for them (lowering the class pass mark, for example), after which they feel that they no longer even need to attend classes: We have one girl who doesn't go to classes at all. I met her today on the stairs [and] she immediately looked at her phone. I go to attend a lesson to translate-she's not there. I don't understand what's going on at all. 24 Respondents mentioned some exceptional cases in which teachers at their colleges knew sign language or were able to communicate through dactyl (fingerspelling); for example, long-serving teachers in colleges that had a history of training DHOH students. Even in these apparently more favourable circumstances, however, DHOH students still have to balance, on one hand, their need for conditions that will enable them to learn, and on the other, their desire to pursue a particular career. As evidenced by one respondent from Moscow who had changed colleges to pursue his dream of working as a designer, this can be impossible: [In my first college] they taught well not only with sign language but also with dactyl, thanks to which I could understand the material. Half of the teachers knew dactyl … . Here, sometimes, I can speak with my voice and read lips, but most people speak poorly, they have poor articulation. They don't know how to communicate with the deaf. I regret moving. 25 Problems in communication are not only linguistic but concern the specialist pedagogical approaches developed for deaf education (Antonova & Boryakova 2017). Although teachers receive training in these approaches, they lack the skills to be able to work with DHOH children and youth, suggesting that training is rather perfunctory. Ultimately, the introduction of inclusive education appears to encounter systemic resistance from teachers who are simply not ready to restructure the format of classes, and reorient them to include deaf students: Not all teachers are ready to somehow restructure lessons. The programmes should be adapted for them [deaf students]. And this requires additional effort, more time. To do this, you need to restructure the format. 26 Into the labour market: confronting reality As noted above, there are similarities between hearing and hard-of-hearing students in vocational colleges in terms of their socio-economic backgrounds, but significant differences in relation to their institutional experiences at school and the way they approach transitions into secondary vocational colleges. These differences are further apparent in the ways hearing and hard-of-hearing students envisage the role of vocational education within their longer-term trajectories into adulthood. While hearing students 24 Translator in an inclusive college, Moscow, 10 November 2017. 25 Artem, 20 years old, Moscow, 20 September 2017. 26 Teacher and translator at an inclusive college, Moscow, 26 October 2017. mostly approach vocational education as a bridge that will enable them to combine work with higher education, potentially in an entirely different area (Belyakov et al. 2018;Konstantinovskii & Popova 2018;Walker 2018;Cherednichenko 2019), DHOH youth overwhelmingly consider it to be an end destination in the education system intended primarily to get them into work, with only 19% in our survey indicating plans to continue their education after college. Getting a job thus clearly played an important role in our respondents' approaches to the achievement of independence, with the ability to obtain future employment occupying second place in factors determining their choice of subject at college (after personal interest), and future salary occupying fourth place. By contrast, similar surveys of hearing students at vocational colleges in Russia have salary in second place (also after personal interest) (Konstantinovskii & Popova 2018), which, alongside plans for higher education, suggests a concern to achieve not only independence, but some form of social mobility (Walker 2015(Walker , 2018. For DHOH youth, as for Shah's respondents in the UK (2008), independence itself was an aspiration, and it would be achieved, hopefully, doing something they enjoyed: You need to keep achieving things, doing interesting things, to get to where you want to be. You need to keep learning, show your talent, understand what you can and can 't do. 27 In this way, just as they had on entering college, these orientations towards transition after college reflected the respondents' horizons for action, their perceptions of what was both achievable and appropriate for them. In contrast to their experiences of entering college, however, when proximity to deaf culture was a primary concern for most, there was diversity in respondents' orientations towards the hearing and deaf worlds when thinking about future employment. For some, communication with other deaf people remained critical: Most likely it would be better to work with the deaf, in terms of communication … with the hearing there would just be no one to communicate with. Yes, it's unlikely that I'd be ready to work with the hearing. 28 Others, by contrast, were actively pursuing the possibility of working with hearing people, albeit mindful of the modes of communication they would use and of the way they would be treated by the hearing: I plan to work next summer in a store where everyone else is hearing. No problem at all. No, it's important that there is a good, adequate working team. So that everyone treats each other with respect, so that they understand that I am deaf. So that everyone is on an equal footing at work, and everything is fair. I don't care if they are hearing or not. But it is very important that we find an approach so that we can write in our phones or on paper if I do not understand. While these respondents were thus actively looking forward to beginning their working lives, their encounters with the labour market mirrored their experience of enrolling and studying in vocational colleges in that they were met with the same narrowing of opportunities, due both to a lack of enabling structures and to social discrimination. The survey results indicate that even before entering the labour market, this is what young DHOH people expect: only 25% of respondents were sure that finding a job would not be difficult, while 75% assumed that it would be difficult and take a long time. Those who already had experience of the labour market through part-time employment were similarly negative in their assessment of their prospects of finding a stable job.
Discrimination mostly took the form of employers suspecting that DHOH people would be incapable of completing the work tasks required of them, and this reflected both discrimination against DHOH people internationally (Nikolaraizi & Makri 2005;Lee & Pott 2018) and also against other disabled groups within Russia (Romanov & Iarskaia-Smirnova 2008). Some respondents had already been subjected to negative stereotyping when trying to find a job, while others had heard about similar cases from their friends and acquaintances or, in some cases, their deaf parents: So many employers don't understand … . I tried to get a job as a confectioner in a hotel. They took my documents, and then they came up five minutes later and said they had to talk to the chef. They'd already taken the documents and were about to employ me, but when they found out that I was deaf, they told me I wasn't suitable. Is it really necessary for a confectioner to hear? 30 People don't want to take on a disabled person who destroys things and does a poor job. Who needs it … [but] this is just the opinion of hearing people. They are just afraid of the deaf. 31 Alongside outright discrimination, the inability or unwillingness of employers to adopt enabling practices that would allow DHOH people to perform particular work tasks was also widespread and similarly reflected international experience (Luft 2000;Lott et al. 2019). Employers often regard writing, be it on paper or on digital devices, as an uncomfortable form of communication. For example, even if a hearing-impaired candidate has residual hearing, wears a hearing aid, speaks well and reads lips, their prospective employers feel that without the possibility of telephone communication it will be difficult to contact them or for them to do the job they are applying for. This is often mentioned as the reason for refusal even for positions that do not require communication with people, as the story of our informant from Yaroslavl' illustrates: In cases where DHOH young people graduating from vocational colleges are able to find work, they can expect it to be low-skilled manual employment that barely allows them to earn a living, let alone establish a career. Employers are primarily large-scale businesses in the manufacturing and service sectors such as factories and supermarkets, while managerial and office work is perceived as totally inaccessible: 'Many deaf people work in ASHAN [a hypermarket chain]. You can find a lot of them there, and in factories, where you can do everything with your hands'. 33 Such types of work clearly bear no relationship to the professional training undertaken by graduates of vocational colleges. Nevertheless, encouraging these companies to continue offering employment to DHOH youth has become a priority form of social partnership for the VOG in recent years, a development which reflects the significant deterioration of employment prospects for the deaf over the postsocialist period. Indeed, at a recent conference of the VOG, while restating the need to work with major service sector employers, delegates lodged a proposal to consider 'the restoration and development of the system of Educational-Industrial Enterprises in the VOG system as a tool for career guidance, employment and vocational training of persons with hearing impairments'. 34 While a restoration of the infrastructure managed by the VOG during the Soviet period is highly unrealistic, this proposal itself is indicative of the change in fortunes that the shift from state socialist to market forms of governmentality has brought for the deaf.
With regard to pay, unfair treatment was further apparent. Respondents noted significant pay differentials between hearing and deaf employees even when doing the same jobs and performing the same tasks at the same pace. This reflects the findings of labour studies in Russia showing widespread discrimination against employees with disabilities (Dem'yanova & Luk'yanova 2017) as well as the ineffectiveness and lack of enforcement of current anti-discrimination legislation (Zhavoronkov 2014): I worked at a chocolate factory … the salary was very small. A big difference in income. Hearing employees, of course, receive more. There are far fewer deaf people. [In my current job] there's also a big difference in salary between me and the hearing. 35 As noted above in relation to education, DHOH youth tend not to understand their legal rights and rarely stand up for them when confronted with discrimination in relation to hiring or to pay, instead perceiving these as a natural difficulty resulting from external circumstances or the rational behaviour of employers. However, in the case quoted above, Tanya even threatened legal action against her employer, with the help of the NGO 33 Masha, 20 years old, Moscow, 13 October 2017. 34 'Glukhiye mogut vse: trudoustroystvo bez barʹerov', Voginfo, 2 October 2019, available at: https:// voginfo.ru/vog/2019/09/26/glukhie-mogut-vse-trudoustrojstvo-bez-barerov/, accessed 28 October 2019. Educational-Industrial Enterprises (Uchebno-Proizvodstvennye Predpriyatiya-UPP) were operational factories with integrated vocational training facilities for deaf adults and school leavers, and were managed by the All-Russian Society of the Deaf. After acquiring the skills necessary to operate specialised machinery, as well as achieving basic literacy, many UPP trainees made the transition to employment in state enterprises. See Shaw (2017). 35 Tanya, 23 years old, Moscow, 12 August 2017.
Perspektiva, which also provides employment support for people with other disabilities. Nevertheless, legal assistance is not available to all (Larionov 2018), and in Tanya's case made no difference. Most DHOH are simply resigned to pay differentials, seeing them as unfair, but inevitable: 'Well, it's always been like that. Hearing people get more, deaf people get less'. 36 Assistance with finding employment (trudoustroistvo) is also largely unavailable, with respondents depending on friends, acquaintances and relatives (49%) or job advertisements (30%) to find out about jobs. While some colleges maintain partnerships with employers in the manufacturing sector, the jobs available through these links tend to be in low-paid, low-prestige manual work that is no more popular with DHOH youth than it is with hearing youth (Walker 2011). Although professional job fairs for the deaf are beginning to emerge in Russia-Abilympics and DeafSkills, for example (Aleksievskikh & Shatula 2017)-these are targeted at the minority of DHOH youth who obtain higher education and win competitions for their achievements, and have no impact on the problem of mass employment of DHOH youth graduating from vocational colleges. The lack of assistance with job placements is especially problematic given the educational choices made by DHOH youth in the context of the limitations encountered on entering colleges outlined above. Alongside in-demand but low-paid trades such as sewing machinist, the most popular trades chosen by DHOH youth in 2015 (Minobrnauki 2015) included prosthetic dentistry, adaptive physical education, laboratory diagnostics and digital information processing. The likelihood that DHOH graduates of these trades could find jobs corresponding to their qualifications in their local labour markets without assistance is close to zero: They [graduates] were surprised that, after graduation, they were not helped to get a job. Deaf people had to look for work on their own, but, unfortunately, companies turned them down because of their deafness. The guys studied in vain. And despite the diploma, they had to get a job at a factory, in a store. 37

Conclusion
Youth transitions into employment across the industrialised world have come to be characterised by greater insecurity and precariousness in recent decades, as young people navigate a greater range of choices and risks both in education and work and do so without the social guarantees enjoyed by previous generations (Furlong & Cartmel 2007;Walker & Stephenson 2012;O'Reilly et al. 2019). For young people with social, cultural and material resources, this precariousness is a temporary phenomenon, as they gradually make their way through non-standardised, non-linear routes into something resembling stability (Auer & Cazes 2003). For others, however, it is a more permanent state, resulting in social marginalisation. In the case of deaf and hard-of-hearing youth in Russia, the majority of whom follow the vocational pathway through the education 36 Artem, 20 years old, Moscow, 20 September 2017. 37 Artur, 20 years old, Moscow, 26 October 2017. system, this marginalisation takes a familiar form. As Shah (2008) also finds, while our respondents were inspired by the transformative promises of the education and labour markets to develop aspirations much like those of hearing youth, their pathways were characterised not by an expansion of choice, but by an ever-decreasing set of possibilities that gradually narrowed their horizons for action to a vanishing point. Central to this narrowing of choice is the ongoing salience of the medical model of disability, which, despite the apparent shift towards a social model with the Educational Reform of 2012, continues to manifest itself in narrow prescriptions of what deaf and hard-of-hearing youth can and cannot do. While an enabling ethos clearly underpins the attempt to foster an inclusive approach, the lack of resources to realise this ethos means that the education system remains a disabling institution. Moving into the labour market, DHOH youth are then often confronted with disabling attitudes that further narrow their prospects, again with de jure rights de facto not held up. In this way, DHOH youth in Russia appear stuck between two different modes of governmentality which exclude them in different ways, one limiting them through outdated bureaucratic processes while the other simultaneously promises and denies new forms of self-realisation.
Given the resounding negativity of their experiences of college and entering the labour market, it is not surprising that the deaf community remains central to our respondents' horizons for action as they progress into adult life. It remains to be seen whether the Russian state will be more successful at working with that community than the Soviet state was. Although social stereotypes and prejudices may be harder to dislodge, not least as long as the medical model of disability remains ubiquitous, many of the problems faced by DHOH youth are about resources, enforcement and representation, which brings them firmly into the realms of social policy and civil society. The more positive developments seen in recent years-the establishment of professional job fairs for people with disabilities, employment partnerships between the VOG and commercial companies, and the emergence of NGOs providing legal aid to the deaf-suggests that small steps towards greater inclusion are being taken. While some of these steps are reflective of efforts to foster social inclusion in Western societies, others, such as the VOG's attempts to re-establish the educational workshops they provided during the Soviet period, are a further reflection of the continuing legacy of Soviet paternalistic systems, whether through institutional inertia or as a novel response to market failure.