On 20th January 2021, SEAC is hosting a Book Launch for the 2020 book 'Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia', written by SEAC Associate Prof. Katherine Brickell (Royal Holloway, University of London). This event invites four panellists to discuss the book and Prof Brickell responds to them. This event will be chaired by Prof. Hyun Bang Shin.

Book Outline

Home SOS argues that the home is central to the violence and gendered contingency of existence in crisis ordinary Cambodia. Based on over 300 interviews and conducted over 15 years, this book focuses on women’s experiences of survival-work in (un)eventful situations of domestic violence and forced eviction. Charting the journey of Cambodia’s first-ever domestic violence law, alongside women’s housing activism against forced eviction, Home SOS explores how the political economy of the country has conspired to limit - and in some cases quash - the transformative potential that each might hold. Together, domestic violence and forced eviction are shown to be interrelated oppressions and brutalisations of domestic life that gravitate and retrain multiple subfields of geography on to the home sphere as a public-private hybrid worthy of energised study.

Speaker and Chair biographies

• Prof Katherine Brickell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), UK and SEAC Associate. At RHUL she is Director of the Geopolitics, Development, Security and Justice Research Group. She is also editor of the journal Gender, Place and Culture and is former Chair of the RGS-IBG Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group. Her feminist-oriented research cross-cuts social, political, development, and legal geography, with a long standing focus on the domestic sphere as a precarious space of contemporary everyday life. Katherine’s work forwards scholarship on critical geographies of home and gendered experiences of violence explored through in-depth qualitative interviews and visual methods, and conceptual thinking on intimate war and slow violence, law and lawfare, and rights to dwell. Her research and writing aims to reaffirm and reprioritise the home as a political entity which is foundational to the concerns of human geography. Katherine’s new monograph Home SOS: Gender, Violence and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia brings domestic violence and forced eviction into twin view to pursue this, and was published in July 2020 by the Wiley RGS-IBG Book Series.
• Dr W. Nathan Green has been assistant professor of geography at the National University of Singapore since January 2020. Prior to arriving in Singapore, he received his MA in Southeast Asian Studies in 2014 and his PhD in geography in 2019 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research critically examines economic development, agrarian change, and rural livelihoods in Southeast Asia. He is currently leading a project that will investigate the creation of Cambodia’s national financial market as part of a larger trend of financialization in Southeast Asia, and how these new markets are transforming agrarian landscapes. His work has been published in highly-ranked geography journals and he is the recipient of multiple awards from the American Association of Geographers in the US.
• Dr Jordana Ramalho currently works as a lecturer in Urban Planning for Diversity at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Prior to joining DPU, she received her PhD in human geography and urban studies at LSE. Jordana's research spans feminist political ecology, urban geography, critical disaster studies and participatory development in the global South. Her most recent publication is 'Worlding aspirations and resilient futures: Framings of risk and contemporary city‐making in Metro Cebu, the Philippines'.
• Dr Charlie Rumsby is a research fellow at the Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations at Coventry University, and a visiting research fellow at the Anthropology Department at the LSE. Her research connects with issues relating to youth, children, belonging and citizenship. Geographically she focuses on mainland Southeast Asia, where she has conducted research with the Vietnamese diaspora in Cambodia since 2014.
• Dr Sokphea Young obtained his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is currently honorary Research Fellow at the University College London (UK). His research interests are on the areas of grassroots and transnational activism, civil society, visual politics, visual media and development, citizenship, globalisation and development, and political development in Southeast Asia. His research published in Journal of International Relations and Development, Journal of Civil Society, Asian Politics & Policies, Asian Journal of Social Science, Georgetown Journal of Asian Affairs, and Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and as book chapters and other working papers.
• Prof Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science and directs the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. His research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of speculative urbanisation, gentrification and displacement, urban spectacles, and urbanism with particular attention to Asian cities. His books include Planetary Gentrification (Polity, 2016), Neoliberal Urbanism, Contested Cities and Housing in Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (Routledge, 2021), and The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (Routledge, forthcoming). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and is also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation.