Drawing inspiration from layered histories in Long Beach, this roundtable engages the relationships between personal and public, national and transnational, and social, cultural, and political, to query and expand the field formation of Cambodian American and Cambodian Diaspora Studies. Challenging a Western historiography of “tragedy” and liberal humanitarian discourses of trauma which disavow the complex humanity of Cambodian subjects and the continually intersubjective ways in which knowledge about Cambodia is produced and reproduced, we come together in dialogue as junior scholars in various stages and engagements with public and community organizations. Aligned with what Yến Lê Espiritu articulates as “an interdisciplinary field of critical refugee study, which conceptualizes ‘the refugee’ not as an object of investigation but rather as a paradigm ‘whose function [is] to establish and make intelligible a wider set of problems,’” and following Eve Tuck’s critique of “damage-centered research,” we contribute to the epistemological and methodological shift Ngô, Nguyen, and Lam articulate in the introduction to the 2012 issue of Positions dedicated to Southeast Asian American Studies: “mov[ing] from the historical to the historiographic, from the anthropological to the ethnographic, and from past frictions to lingering fictions.”

Coming from diverse areas of study including American, Asian and Asian American Studies, Gender Studies, Theater and Dance, Urban Planning and Ethnomusicology, each participant will situate themselves in relation to the collective intellectual and sociocultural work of the roundtable participants and audience members, collaboratively mapping the past, present, and speculative possibilities of Cambodian American and Cambodian Diaspora Studies.