During your PhD, you conducted extensive fieldwork in Lithuania and the United States. Tell us about this research.
Siliunas: Broadly speaking, my research explores how people interpret and navigate their social relationships and networks in contexts of significant inequality. My early work focused on the U.S. public and non-profit sectors, examining how funding disparities and dependencies shape service providers’ relationships—both with the populations they serve and with partner organizations. This research led me to question how people manage their networks to enhance organizational autonomy and reduce economic dependencies.
For my doctoral dissertation, I investigated similar dynamics in a vastly different context: Lithuania, a Baltic country transitioning from Soviet occupation to self-rule. In the early 1990s, when Lithuania gained independence, the global geopolitical landscape was changing rapidly. The USSR had collapsed, leaving fifteen former Soviet republics to rebuild their national democracies, integrate into a globalizing neoliberal economy, and establish their place in the post-Cold War world. I became particularly intrigued by Lithuania’s path to independence and the role of public art in shaping public discourse about its international relationships—especially with Russia, the U.S., Israel, and the European Union. I analyzed debates surrounding three forms of public art—political street art, monuments, and memorial plaques—to demonstrate how visual representations of both recent and distant history were used to interpret, navigate, and influence Lithuania’s international alliances and dependencies. My findings reveal that by adopting the aesthetic traditions of Western allies, rejecting those of foreign adversaries (especially Russia), and visualizing histories of transnational solidarity, betrayal, and exploitation, both ordinary citizens and elites expressed their aspirations and visions for Lithuania’s future on the global stage.