Khmer Women on the Move

Khmer Women on the Move
Author: Annuska Derks
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008-04-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0824832701

This is a fascinating ethnography about young Khmer women moving to the city to work in the garment factories, in prostitution, and as street sellers. The author makes good use of new theoretical approaches in anthropology that focus on negotiation and creativity in situations of rapid change. The result is not only a welcome new book on post-war Cambodia but an important addition to the literature on women, migration, and labor in Southeast Asia and the world. —Judy Ledgerwood, Northern Illinois University Khmer Women on the Move offers a fascinating ethnography of young Cambodian women who move from the countryside to work in Cambodia’s capital city, Phnom Penh. Female migration and urban employment are rising, triggered by Cambodia’s transition from a closed socialist system to an open market economy. This book challenges the dominant views of these young rural women—that they are controlled by global economic forces and national development policies or trapped by restrictive customs and Cambodia’s tragic history. The author shows instead how these women shape and influence the processes of change taking place in present-day Cambodia. Based on field research among women working in the garment industry, prostitution, and street trading, the book explores the complex interplay between their experiences and actions, gender roles, and the broader historical context. The focus on women involved in different kinds of work allows new insight into women’s mobility, highlighting similarities and differences in working conditions and experiences. Young women’s ability to utilize networks of increasing size and complexity allows them to move into and between geographic and social spaces that extend far beyond the village context. Women’s mobility is further expressed in the flexible patterns of behavior that young rural women display when trying to fulfill their own "modern" aspirations along with their family obligations and cultural ideals.

Women, Work and Care in the Asia-Pacific

Women, Work and Care in the Asia-Pacific
Author: Marian Baird
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2017-01-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317313151

This book provides a comparative analysis of the social, economic, industrial and migration dynamics that structure women’s paid work and unpaid care work experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Each country-focused chapter examines the formal and informal ways in which work and care are managed, the changing institutional landscape, gender relations and fertility concerns, employer and trade union responses and the challenges policy makers face and the consequences of their decisions for working women. By covering the entire region, including Australia and New Zealand, the book highlights the way different national work and care regimes are linked through migration, with wealthier countries looking to their poorer neighbours for alternative sources of labour. In addition, the book contributes to debates about the barriers to women’s participation in the workforce, the valuation of unpaid care, the gender wage gap, social protection and labour regulation for migrant workers and gender relations in developing Asia.

Education in Cambodia

Education in Cambodia
Author: Vincent McNamara
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2022-05-14
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9811682135

This book is the most comprehensive account yet published about the education system in Cambodia. It covers all system levels and draws upon the knowledge and insights of a wide range of leading Cambodian and foreign scholars. The book focuses on how the system has developed and is making progress. Significant achievements over the past two decades are evident, but many problems remain, including the poor quality of teaching, research and institutional management. Under-funding is an ongoing obstacle, but so too is a bureaucratic culture of resistance to change, a history of weak governance, and an anti-reform sentiment deriving from a teacher-centred and exam-driven curriculum. Achieving international standards must now be the system’s highest priority. To this end, the system must rid itself of conservatism, complacency and manipulation by parochial vested interests.

Lost Goddesses

Lost Goddesses
Author: Trudy Jacobsen
Publisher: NIAS Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2008
Genre: History
ISBN: 8776940012

In prehistoric times, Southeast Asian women enjoyed high status. When, how and why did that change? This book explores the history of gender relations through economics, politics, art and literature. This title is a narrative and visual tour de force, of interest to scholars and the general public.

Expressions of Cambodia

Expressions of Cambodia
Author: Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2006-10-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134171951

Taking a theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective, the essays in this collection provide compelling insight into contemporary Cambodian culture at home and abroad. The book represents the first sustained exploration of the relationship between cultural productions and practices, the changing urban landscape and the construction of identity and nation building twenty-five years after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. As such, the team of international contributors address the politics of development and conservation, tradition and modernity within the global economy, and transmigratory movements of the twenty-first century. Expressions of Cambodia presents a new dimension to the Cambodian studies by engaging the country in current debates about globalization and the commodification of culture, post-colonial politics and identity constructions. Timely and much-needed, this volume brings Cambodia back into dialogue with its neighbours, and in so doing, valuably contributes to the growing field of Southeast Asian cultural studies.

The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia

The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia
Author: Katherine Brickell
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 476
Release: 2016-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317567838

Offering a comprehensive overview of the current situation in the country, The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia provides a broad coverage of social, cultural, political and economic development within both rural and urban contexts during the last decade. A detailed introduction places Cambodia within its global and regional frame, and the handbook is then divided into five thematic sections: Political and Economic Tensions Rural Developments Urban Conflicts Social Processes Cultural Currents The first section looks at the major political implications and tensions that have occurred in Cambodia, as well as the changing parameters of its economic profile. The handbook then highlights the major developments that are unfolding within the rural sphere, before moving on to consider how cities in Cambodia, and particularly Phnom Penh, have become primary sites of change. The fourth section covers the major processes that have shaped social understandings of the country, and how Cambodians have come to understand themselves in relation to each other and the outside world. Section five analyses the cultural dimensions of Cambodia’s current experience, and how identity comes into contact with and responds to other cultural themes. Bringing together a team of leading scholars on Cambodia, the handbook presents an understanding of how sociocultural and political economic processes in the country have evolved. It is a cutting edge and interdisciplinary resource for scholars and students of Southeast Asian Studies, as well as policymakers, sociologists and political scientists with an interest in contemporary Cambodia.

Southeast Asia and the Civil Society Gaze

Southeast Asia and the Civil Society Gaze
Author: Gabi Waibel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2013-11-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134634366

As developing countries with recent histories of isolation and extreme poverty, followed by restoration and reform, both Cambodia and Vietnam have seen new opportunities and demands for non-state actors to engage in and manage the effects of rapid socio-economic transformation. This book examines how in both countries, civil society actors and the state manage their relationship to one another in an environment that is continuously shaped and (re)constructed by changing legislation, collaboration and negotiation, advocacy and protest, and social control. Further, it explores the countries’ divergent experiences whilst also uncovering the underlying basis and drivers of civil society activity that are shared by Cambodia and Vietnam. Crucially, this book engages with the contested nature of civil society and how it is socially constructed through research and development activities, by looking at contemporary discourses and manifestations of civil society in the two countries, including national and community-level organisations, associations, and networks that operate in a variety of sectors, such as gender, the environment and health. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted in Cambodia and Vietnam, this book will be of huge interest to students and scholars of Southeast Asian studies, Southeast Asian politics, development studies and civil society.

Famine in Cambodia

Famine in Cambodia
Author: James A. Tyner
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2023-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0820363758

This book examines three consecutive famines in Cambodia during the 1970s, exploring both continuities and discontinuities of all three. Cambodia experienced these consecutive famines against the backdrop of four distinct governments: the Kingdom of Cambodia (1953-1970), the U.S.-supported Khmer Republic (1970-1975), the communist Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979), and the Vietnamese-controlled People's Republic of Kampuchea (1979-1989). Famine in Cambodia documents how state-induced famine constituted a form of sovereign violence and operated against the backdrop of sweeping historical transformations of Cambodian society. It also highlights how state-induced famines should not be solely framed from the vantage point in which famine occurs but should also focus on the geopolitics of state-induced famines, as states other than Cambodia conditioned the famine in Cambodia. Drawing on an array of theorists, including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Achille Mbembe, James A. Tyner provides a conceptual framework to bring together geopolitics, biopolitics, and necropolitics in an effort to expand our understanding of state-induced famines. Tyner argues that state-induced famine constitutes a form of sovereign violence-a form of power that both takes life and disallows life.

Women and Sex Work in Cambodia

Women and Sex Work in Cambodia
Author: Larissa Sandy
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2014-08-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131764929X

Prostitution is strongly embedded in local cultural practices in Cambodia. Based on extensive original research, this book explores the nature of prostitution in Cambodia, providing explanations of why the phenomenon is so widely tolerated. It outlines the background of the French colonial period, with its filles malades, considers the contemporary legal framework, and analyses the motivations for sex work, examining in particular how women become locked into debt bondage. Overall the book provides significant contributions to wider debates about sex work, sex trafficking and the constrained nature of women’s choices.