Research
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Research Statement
My research in a nutshell.
Drawing attention to lived experiences of ethnicity, gender, and enduring poverty, my research asks, “security, for whom?” and investigates how communities respond to national crises in both attitude and policy.
I approach “security” from multiple scales of human experience, in which the local is defined at the crossroads of individual identity, health, and social mobility, but situated within an international scope of capitalist securitization practices.
Broadly speaking, my research examines security through the lens of precarity, in which persons are mobilized or marginalized for socioeconomic and political reasons. I am interested in the interrelationship between material and mental health, the politics of belonging, and the psycho-social impact of militarism and the security state on community wellbeing.
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My theoretical framework and practice combines political economies of labor and the state, as well as intersectional feminism.
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Doctoral Dissertation
The Impact of European Integration and Securitization on Refugees, Labor Migrants, and Soldiers in Lithuania
In the aftermath of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, my doctoral research took place in Lithuania, where public alarm over foreign encroachment anticipated territorial conflict with Russia, as well as an “invasion” of Muslim refugees said to threaten Lithuania’s cultural integrity as a white, Catholic country with a dwindling population.
Utilizing critical anthropologies of militarization and interdisciplinary political economy, my research examined Lithuania’s national security response to Russian aggression via the reinstatement of conscription and to the EU's refugee relocation quota in both public attitude and policy.
My goal was to compare the Lithuanian state’s relationship with Western security structures, including increased integration with NATO and the EU, with the precarious livelihoods of ordinary people who mitigate daily experiences of chronic unemployment, mass emigration, alcoholism, and the highest rates of suicide in the EU. I showed how the military imparts a moralizing effect on the nation’s “disposable bodies,” and how the state can in this way contain identities deemed intolerable to Lithuanian national security.