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. 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 how Cambodian media workers after the Khmer Rouge repaired film and radio infrastructures, and how contemporary new media workers find and repair media artifacts from before the war period and disseminate them (often) using social media. The book presents a critical analysis of the political economy of platforms in post-conflict/post-colonial environments while also arguing that creative appropriation can be a form of healing and political action. The book is in conversation with infrastructure studies, repair studies, and feminist STS.

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.