Cultural models and cognitive anthropology; migration, mobility and the cultural construction of belonging; gender, livelihoods and development; digital society, technology and cultural change.

Lithuania; Baltic-Nordic region; Southeast Asia (in particular Cambodia)

Rūta Dapkūnaitė is a social and cultural anthropologist whose research examines how cultural knowledge and shared cognitive frameworks shape societal responses to migration, development, and change. She holds an M.A. in Sociocultural Anthropology from Vytautas Magnus University (VMU), and a Certificate in Intercultural Understanding from Southern Illinois University.

She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Lithuania and Cambodia, with research cutting across migration studies, cognitive anthropology, and development. She has held visiting academic positions at COMPAS, University of Oxford, and the Social Anthropology Department, University of Fribourg, held research and teaching fellowships at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga and the Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies (BICEPS), and worked as a case manager with refugee populations at the Lithuanian Red Cross. Her work spans academic anthropology and applied cross-sectoral research, in collaboration with public, private, and international organisations.

Her doctoral dissertation "Local Cultural Models and Varying Responses Towards Immigrants: An Anthropological Analysis of Acceptance and Resistance in Lithuania" examines how shared cultural models generate opposing societal responses to different immigrant groups within the same institutional and legal framework. Drawing on approximately 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, 105 semi-structured interviews, and two waves of freelist data from 81 participants across three distinct migration crises - Syrian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian - the research identifies four dominant cultural models shaping reception patterns in Lithuania: Us vs. Them, Political Kinship, Limited Good, and Cultural Preservation. Grounded in Cultural Models Theory, the analysis shows that visible cultural markers, not legal status, activate these cognitive frameworks, producing markedly different outcomes for different groups.

She is also a research fellow at Institute of Digital Resources and Interdisciplinary Research (SITTI), VMU on the LINC project (Linguistic Integration of Refugee Children and their Families), a comparative study of Ukrainian refugee linguistic integration in Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and Lithuania.

• Dapkunaite, R. 2023. Perception of Refugees in Lithuania. Swiss Journal of Sociocultural Anthropology, SJSCA Jg. 28, DOI: 10.36950/sjsca.2022.28.8024
• Dapkunaite, R. 2021. Ontological Conditions Underlying Lithuanian Intolerance Toward Refugees. Journal Sovijus. 2021, T. 9, Nr. 1, p. 60-71.
• De Munck, Victor C., Dapkunaite, R. 2020. Cultural aspect and concept of Lithuanian kinship: validity of free list method for creating a representative kinship model. Philosophy. Sociology. 2020, t. 31, Nr. 4, p. 328-338
• De Munck, V. C., & Dapkunaite, R. 2018. The modern Lithuanian kinship system: a descriptive analysis of generational differences in reckoning the saliency of kin terms. Journal of Baltic Studies, 49(1), 63–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2017.1313286
• Ruta Dapkunaite (2014). State’s Poverty Conception and the Problem of Welfare: Cambodian Case // Logos 78, 2014, 180-193.

CV Rūta Dapkūnaitė (PDF, 192 KB)