Alfiya Lyapina is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the HSE University in Moscow. She is primarily interested in migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Russian migration policy, Caucasus studies, and ethnography methods. As Pre-doctoral Research Fellow, she is working on an article under the supervision of Prof. Theodore Gerber based on six months ethnography among Syrian migrants & refugees in Moscow in a context where they were not welcome.