Public memory, museums, visual and material culture
Public remembrance of the Khmer Rouge regime by the post-1979 Cambodian state has long been a research focus of mine.
I have written about a number of Cambodian museums and memorials as important national and international sites.
With Dr Candice Boyd, I have also examined exhibitions dealing with other traumatic histories, including intimate war experiences in Australia, and psychiatric institutionalisation in Italy. From this work, we developed a creative arts-based methodology for evaluating visitor experiences of affective spaces, resulting in the book Emotion and the Contemporary Museum (Palgrave, 2020).
Justice-seeking through tribunals and transnational activism
This work centres on the United Nations-supported Khmer Rouge Tribunal – also known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) – the most important international legal process in our region in a generation.
My 2016-2019 ARC fellowship examined the memorial, documentation, and reparation legacies of the ECCC. I have contributed analyses of these justice processes that are grounded in long-term empirical research, showing how international legal processes sometimes adopt neoliberal and developmentalist ways of working.
Wider research on historical campaigns of justice-seeking for Khmer Rouge crimes has uncovered very different ways of working grounded in transnational solidarity.
Reparations for historical crimes
Reparation for historical crimes is a growing field of research. Reparations are a feature of some tribunals and courts and are increasingly sought by social justice campaigns worldwide.
I’m currently thinking through how tribunal reparations differ from reparations sought from settler-colonial states like Australia where reparative failure has more often been the norm.
I’ve published on the reparative role of art and ‘memory activation’ (Memory Studies journal 2024) and I am co-editing a book on Worldmaking Reparations (forthcoming University of Michigan Press).
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Rachel Hughes 