I am a political anthropologist working on state-citizen relations. Currently, I investigate the convergence and congruence of post-Soviet and neoliberal modes of governance and citizens’ reactive practices. I have conducted more then two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Tajikistan and Russia among bureaucrats and migrant workers. My fields sites include: 1) migration management bureaucracies, including international organizations, non-governmental organizations and civil society organizations; 2) infrastructures of migration, including airports, language centers, legalization centers, and construction sites; and 3) Dushanbe, the capital of Tajikistan, with a focus on city development and city planning. At the present moment I am investigating the following theoretical concepts: the politics of representation, labour, state and market ideologies, authoritarianism, power, the politics of despair, violence and belonging, modernity, historicity, and the phenomenology of being-out-of-place.