Alima Bissenova is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Nazarbayev University. She obtained her PhD in 2012 at Cornell University, has Bachelor’s degree in Kazakh language and literature from the Karaganda State University and a Master’s in Middle East Studies. In her current research, she investigates the social implications of post-Soviet development through the prism of the changing environment of Kazakhstan’s cities, newly emerging lifestyles and subjectivities, strategies of mobility, and new religious sensitivities in the urban space. She is in the process of completing her first book manuscript Learning to Be Bourgeois: the Rise of the Middle Classes in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan. She is also leading an interdisciplinary project which deals with the issues of coloniality of knowledge, contemporary and historical intellectual networks, knowledge transfers and transformations of cultural capital from generation to generation and from one locality to another.