Futureproof
Published
My first book, Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life, which I co-edited with Asher Ghertner and Daniel Goldstein, was published by Duke University Press in 2020. Across ten chapters, as well as a foreword, introduction, and afterword, the book’s sixteen contributors examine security as a sensory domain, shedding new light on the security practices, infrastructures, and technologies that permeate everyday life. With Ghertner and Goldstein, I co-authored the introduction, “Security Aesthetics of and beyond the Biopolitical,” which develops a conceptual genealogy for understanding three modalities of security aesthetics.
Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (Duke University Press, 2020)
Refuge in a Bamboo City
In Progress
I am revising my dissertation, which I completed at Rutgers University in 2024, into a book manuscript examining the history and legacies of Khao I Dang, a refugee camp established in Thailand after the Cambodian genocide. The manuscript draws on extensive archival and oral history research, as well as analysis of memoirs and autobiographies.
As an extension of this project, I am developing an oral history collection called “Recollecting Khao I Dang,” in partnership with interview narrators and the Rutgers Oral History Archives, that will comprise a selection of interview transcripts completed as part of my dissertation research.
“Khao-I-Dang, refugee camp. Aerial view” (1979). Photo by Gérard Leblanc. © ICRC (Source: ICRC Audiovisual Archives)
Untitled
In Progress
I am working on a book about war, memory, and mourning—inspired by family history.
J. A. Barhydt, Crayon Portraiture: Complete Instructions for Making Crayon Portraits on Crayon Paper and on Platinum, Silver, and Bromide Enlargements, Revised and Enlarged Edition (New York: The Baker and Taylor Co., 1892), p. 40. (Source: Getty Research Institute / Internet Archive)
Impassable Visions
Published
In 2018, a book chapter I co-authored with Alexander Laban Hinton, in A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (edited by Antonius C. G. M. Robben), was published by Wiley-Blackwell. The chapter, “Impassable Visions: The Cambodia to Come, the Detritus in its Wake,” examines what we argue was a key dynamic underlying the Cambodian genocide. If the revolutionary society of the Khmer Rouge was “to come,” to borrow Jacques Derrida’s phrase, the aspiration contained the seeds of its own undoing: the detritus—from the physical garbage of the old regime to its corrupt traditions to the contaminating incorrigibles—needed to constitute the imagined pure state to which it was opposed.
A Companion to the Anthropology of Death (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018)
Memories of Forced Transfer
Published
As a member of the International Working Group on Cambodia and Southeast Asia (IC-SEA) at the Rutgers Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, I co-led an IC-SEA team contributing to a reparations project endorsed by the Trial Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Case 002/1. Specifically, the IC-SEA team assisted the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) with the development of exhibitions, on the forced transfer of people during the Khmer Rouge regime, to be installed at provincial museums in Cambodia. As part of this collaboration, I also co-authored, with Samphors Huy and Kosal Path, “Memories of Forced Transfer,” a short essay in the exhibition catalog, which was published by DC-Cam in 2014.
The Forced Transfer: The Second Evacuation of People during the Khmer Rouge Regime (2014). Catalog for museum exhibitions by the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts and the Documentation Center of Cambodia.
Humans-as-waste
Published
In 2014, a short essay I wrote on “humans-as-waste” was published in the online Discard Studies Compendium, edited by Max Liboiron, Michele Acuto, and Robin Nagle. The essay reviews literature examining the production of humans as a form of waste—often as a condition of colonialism, modernity, and capitalism—and identifies key analytical and conceptual approaches engaged by scholars.
DiscardStudies.com