Current & Future Work
Current Book Project
From dissertation to manuscript for international audience
Drawing from feminist, intersectional scholarship, my current book project transforms the original doctoral work into a monograph that more specifically focuses on the reinstatement and lived experience of conscription and its psycho-social impact on Lithuanian society.
It is organized around asylum social workers and soldiers, who are critical in defining migration and security policy, and play a pedagogical role in shaping a sense of safety and belonging among the general public. In their capacity (respectively) to facilitate asylum, and to police borders and the movement or containment of Others, my goal is to articulate how these sectors contribute to policy formation at the intersection of rank-and-file thinking and public discourse.
The project explores themes of gender, ethnicity, and militarized identities that constitute community wellbeing, and suggests that at a time fraught with a national security crisis, mass emigration, and an underserved mental health crisis, military service is the gauge for determining what bodies and minds are of value. This project prepares me for fieldwork in North America, read below!
Research Trajectory
From the EU to Canada and the United States
My ongoing research and career objectives bring my mainstay themes of national security and identity, as well as “selective (re)settlement” closer to home to North America, where I intend to pursue comparative work and community-oriented projects in the United States and Canada. I am delving deeper into the question of security as a relationship of material and mental health, of identity and belonging, and articulate these as conditional to community wellbeing.
My first line of inquiry takes interest in migration politics and social mobility, wherein previously mobile persons including asylum seekers and soldiers or veterans are (re)settled or (re)integrated into society and expected to thrive in a new environment. I examine security here not in terms of individual agency in the “success stories” of integration per se, but foreground the sustainability of livelihoods as a product of the receiving society; its social system, structural organization, and sense of community.
The second line of inquiry examines the enduring and emergent issues of systemic racism and police violence in the United States, but specifically through the lens of “anti-mask” culture as a response to the COVID-19 public health crisis. Taking stock of my research in Lithuania on the paradox of being a democratic EU country whilst harboring military conscription and anti-Muslim refugee sentiment, with these newer inquiries I question security under Trump's particular brand of authoritarianism in the US, but also in how American and Canadian attitudes and policy differ dealing with such crises. In so doing, I examine lived experiences of health and anxiety in a time of uncertainty, and draw attention back to the question of whose safety, and who is supposed to be responsible for it?