Media Ruins: Cambodian Postwar Media Reconstruction and the Geopolitics of Technology was published by the MIT Press in 2023 and is the winner of the Best 2024 Information Science Book award by ASIS&T. It also received an Honorable Mention for the Benda Prize at the 2025 Association of Asian Studies for a first book on a topic in Southeast Asia. This book is based on my PhD dissertation, which won the Cornell Southeast Asia Studies Lauriston Sharp Prize for best dissertation in 2020.

This book 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 are based on my historical and ethnographic research in Phnom Penh beginning in January 2014, including 20 months of full-time research from June 2017-January 2019.

The book is now available for purchase (via Bookshop.org amongst other e-commerce platforms) and is available open access via MIT’s Direct to Open Initiative. The book is part of the Labor and Technology series (editor: Katie Helke, series editor: Winifred Poster). I completed this research with the financial support of the US National Science Foundation and a US federal Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship.