Fifty years after the Khmer Rouge genocide killed a quarter of Cambodia’s population, the survivors, their descendants, and the diaspora still experience loss in ways that shape their present lives—but no one has systematically studied how those experiences actually feel from the inside. The problem is that existing approaches to post-genocide experience tend to focus on clinical trauma or political history, missing the subtle, elusive ways that absence, collective grief, and haunting permeate everyday life. This project fills that gap by combining phenomenology—the philosophical study of lived experience—with photography as a method to capture what words alone cannot express. If successful, the research will produce a new framework for understanding how genocide echoes through present experience, grounded in the work of Cambodian artists in Cambodia and the UK. That framework could help organisations working with conflict-affected communities design more sensitive support, and it may be adapted for other post-conflict settings. The project also builds a network linking diaspora artists with academic researchers, and offers a fresh way to interpret contemporary Cambodian art as a record of experiential themes. This is fundamental, curiosity-driven work—it does not promise a therapy or a policy tool, but deeper understanding of how people live with catastrophic loss.
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The project’s overall aim is to lay the foundations for a new approach to understanding Cambodian experiences post-genocide, which integrates phenomenology and photography as a method of inquiry. 2025 marks 50 years since the fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge and the start of the Cambodian genocide, in which a quarter of the population lost their lives. These events continue to structure experiences of the present in different ways for Cambodians, including in the country, the diaspora, survivors, and their descendants. Reckoning with the past involves understanding its multifaceted impact on present experiences, which is necessary for personal and cultural renewal. Phenomenology is centrally concerned with the ways that present experience is shaped by factors including: social practices, the past, and psychological phenomena. It seeks to understand experience from the subject’s perspective, articulating its more elusive aspects, and analysing how different phenomena show up in the structure of the experienced world. Photography grapples with the problem of visually representing complex features of our existence, and as such, can yield insight into the many ways experience is shaped by factors beyond the immediately visible. Phenomenology and photography thus offer a unique and complementary set of resources for understanding experience. We aim to develop an approach that integrates them through using both to investigate the complex ways that the genocide echoes through Cambodian experiences of the present. The project focuses on experiences of loss. It aims to provide an analysis of three experiential themes identified through our preliminary work as characterising different Cambodian experiences post-genocide: (i) experiences of absence, where a loss may have a peculiar quasi-presence; (ii) collective grief, which - rather than being a mere feeling - patterns the experienced world in different ways; (iii) experiences of being haunted by what is lost, including ghost experiences and the embedding of past traumas in the experienced landscape. The data for the project will be experiences of contemporary Cambodian artists based in Cambodia and the UK. This approach has been chosen because art is widely used by Cambodian individuals and communities to process traumatic events. Moreover, conversation about difficult and elusive experiences can be facilitated by using artworks as a starting-point for dialogue. Art’s roles in expressing experience can also afford the artist greater insight into it. By working with artists, two further aims of the project will also be realised. One is to develop a network of Cambodian artists in the country and diaspora, linking it to academic researchers. A second is to provide a new categorisation and understanding of some contemporary Cambodian artworks as expressive of experiential themes (i) - (iii), identified above. The project lays foundations for further research into Cambodian experiences post-genocide. Through contributing to a deeper grasp of such experiences, it will aid Cambodia’s task of reckoning with the genocide in service of cultural and personal renewal. The approach developed will also have application in other post-conflict situations. By fostering greater understanding of post-genocide experience, the research will benefit persons affected by conflict, and organisations working with them.
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