Elmira Alihosseini has received her MA in cultural anthropology from Johns Hopkins University and is now a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Anthropology at UofT. She is currently conducting fieldwork for her dissertation which explores the lives of Afghan refugees in Iran’s most populated shrine city, Mashhad. Moving away from the camp/ghetto paradigm of the Refugee Studies, her research focuses on how Hazara Afghans actively and creatively improvise multiple forms of local/urban belonging by participating in divergent sites of neighborhood sociability.