Meet the Author: Media Ruins: Infrastructural Restitution and Building Futures in Post-Conflict Cambodia

This talk describes the ways that Cambodian new media creators commemorate lost artists and an imagined better way of life through finding, repairing, and disseminating historical film, photography and cinema artifacts from before the Khmer Rouge period, often using digital tools. Reconstructing such media artifacts through a process of infrastructural restitution is a mode of healing from decades of national conflict and a form of subtle political action in an increasingly authoritarian Phnom Penh. Building on theory at the intersection of infrastructure studies (Star and Ruhleder, 1996; Larkin, 2013) and media’s relationship to memory (Gordon, 2008; Larkin, 2008; Richards, 1994), the concept of infrastructural restitution allows us to (re)integrate the importance of memory, the affective, and the spiritual into scholarship of infrastructure. This case gives new insight into the tension in transnational technology use between creative appropriation and the problematic political economy of mainstream platforms. The empirical sections of this talk are based on the author's historical and ethnographic research in Phnom Penh beginning in January 2014, including 20 months of full-time research from June 2017-January 2019. In addition, she will expound in the discussion about how this case informs our understanding of the relationships between technology and future-building social movements in 2025.