My teaching is grounded in the belief that knowledge will best meet its transformative potential if it helps students collectively make sense of their lived experiences. I am trained as a sociologist—a discipline that explores how societies are organized, why inequalities exist and persist, and how people experience and negotiate these structures. My own intellectual journey led me to Lithuania, the country that my grandparents fled during WW2, where people have been debating how to rebuild a democracy in the ashes of an empire, and how to make sense of a difficult history of genocide and imperial violence. I am fascinated by the powerful role that public art has played in facilitating conversation around these deeply personal yet political questions. I have come to realize that much like the college classroom, public art installations can serve as critical sites in which people come together to debate and collectively make sense of the world, and to imagine new alternatives for the future of that world. I hope to continue exploring the political potential of public art in dialogue with my students in the Engagements program.