Doctoral Dissertation Grant: A Historical and Ethnographic Inquiry of Media Creation and Reconstruction

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This project will ask how and in what ways is computing emerging in marginalized settings, such as postcolonial and post-conflict countries by looking at the intersection of media and computing. This project will analyzing computing culture by studying cultural practices and historical media production. It will look at the relationship between memories and media by investigating how transnational forces and locally situated culture interact. It will document the multiplicities of innovation that have practical import for technology-related development initiatives. The results of this research will be of interest to local and international policy makers, funders and local communities. It will contribute to understanding how policies and development funding can build on the efforts of local communities to improve development outcomes. This study will address three primary research questions: (1) how do media exhibits maintain continuity or change thematically? (2) how and to what extent do current film artists and technologists integrate memory, history, and heritage into the process of innovation and future-building? (3) how does a culture's heritage and history of trauma interact with transnational discourses on innovation? This project will answer these questions through ethnography and archival analysis of the remaining and reconstructed historical media from before, during and after the Khmer Rouge period. The researcher will trace the continuities and discontinuities between historical media and new media production, charting ways that contemporary innovators rely on, reconstruct, or rebel from their cultural heritage. This research will also explore ways that contemporary innovation intersects within a transnational context of computing, in order to understand the innovation milieu within a cultural context.