Date/Time
Thursday
2 Mar 2023
4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Location
470 Stephens Hall

Event Type
Colloquium

Margaret Jack
Postdoctoral Scholar at Syracuse University

In this talk, based on her forthcoming book (MIT Press, 2023), Margaret Jack explores how a generation of tech-savvy young Cambodians is restoring historical media artifacts from before the war—and, in the process, helping to repair the Khmer Rouge’s cultural destruction.
Building on theory at the intersection of infrastructure studies and and media’s relationship to memory, Jack finds that reconstructing such media artifacts through a process of infrastructural restitution provides a mode of healing from decades of national conflict and a form of subtle political action in an increasingly authoritarian Phnom Penh. Jack draws on historical and ethnographic research in Phnom Penh spanning 2014 to 2019, to give new insight into the tension in transnational technology use between creative appropriation and the problematic political economy of mainstream platforms.