Organizer: The Center for Khmer Studies
Type/Location: Virtual
Description:
Who talks about the intercourse between a body of research and a researcher’s body? In the middle of my fellowship, I woke up to troubling pain. A disc in my spine choked a nerve, and signals electrified my brain. Later that week, I woke up from a discectomy. Whatever the surgeon extracted looked like overly ripe coconut, white flesh in milky brine. My slipped disc was an occupational hazard—I was a historian bent over in research and writing alongside women’s work (pregnancy, childbirth, childcare). I read the specimen as my academic labor incarnate—an embodiment of stories on colonial power and violence culled from the field and archival work on hospitality and women’s bodies in Cambodia during the period of the French protectorate. My sensations of contemporary pain began to shape my queries of historical pain. And so, the decolonial and feminist proposal that I trouble the field of Cambodian Studies and Southeast Asian Studies with is this: We must interrogate the positionality between the bodies in our research and our researcher bodies, the penetration of historical knowledge on the dead and living, and the methodological and ethical troubles that possess us, when the lives of others, touch us personally.
About the Speaker:
Dr. Tara Tran is a historian of Europe and Southeast Asia. She crafts and curates knowledge and learning projects, following decolonial and feminist practices. Her research interest is hospitality in the context of humanitarianism and development, migration, environmental care, and foodways. Her current book project is entitled “Hospitality Engendered: Women’s Bodies and Humanitarianism in Colonial Cambodia.” She completed her doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins University and, at present, is an Adjunct Professor at the University of New York and the Council on International Educational Exchange in Prague. She also hosts Sala, a community roundtable on unlearning histories.
About the Moderator:
Ponleu Soun, previously a lecturer and research associate at the Department of Media and Communication of the Royal University of Phnom Penh, now serves as the Program Manager of the CKS-Ponlok Chomnes Program at the Center for Khmer Studies. He has presented his research at international conferences, such as the 2nd Asian Summer School on Political Parties and Democracy, the 7th International Conference on International Relations and Development, and the 2023 Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference.
Registration Link:
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