Pharo Sok is a first year doctoral student in History at Concordia University. Drawing on an archive of sixty-one oral histories, ranging from fifty minutes to twenty hours in French, English, and Khmer, and supplemented by additional interviews, his project will explore Khmer Montrealers’ personal and intergenerational processes of memory and identity construction in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-79). Expanding upon current scholarship, this dissertation considers three research questions: How does intergenerational storytelling figure into personal and communal reconciliations in the aftermath of genocide? How do Cambodian narrators of oral histories nuance popular depictions of their ethnic community? How do Khmer narrators transmit stories of the everyday as well as memories of trauma to their offspring? How have subsequent generations constructed their imaginings of Cambodia and their own hybrid identities as Khmer Montrealers? This project builds upon his M.A. work, where he explored the rhetoric of a Cambodian community organization and Cambodian interviewees living in the city during the Khmer Rouge period. The thesis argued that their narrated memories, while contradictory at times, exposed relationships between nation, memory, belonging, and human rights.
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