My research addresses issues of politics, violence and collective memory, as well as global development, human rights and international justice. Building on experience as a forensic anthropologist, my research centres on conflict and violence, with specific attention to mass graves, mass death, genocide, and the politics of death and the dead. I also interrogate the efficacy of geopolitical interventions and universalist assumptions related to trauma, healing, justice, as well as wider human rights discourses on conflict and disaster.
My long term ethnographic research focuses on the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979), with specific attention to mass graves and the dead within them, exploring changing relations to the genocide and its dead, considering how these inform and shapes contemporary Cambodian life. As physical markers of violence and political instability, mass graves make visible the clash between history (as constructed by the state) and memory (as experienced by everyday people), illuminating how moments of national trauma and mass violence re-shape the state and relationships within it, and why destructive periods of violence nonetheless create new fields for the imagination of the religious and the social.
As part of my work I have also worked on DNA identification of human remains, exploring its socio-historical constructs and the assumptions that influence its use in disaster victim identification.
Methodologically I am interested in how creative methodologies enable spaces for exploring difficult and sensitive issues, and how visual methods in particular can offer modes for engaging beyond the academic community. I am trained as a visual anthropologist, and am interested in visual culture, public media and its consumption.