About the Author
Katherine Brickell is Professor of Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), UK. Her research cross‐cuts social, political, legal, and development geography, with a longstanding focus on the domestic sphere as a precarious and gendered space of contemporary everyday life. She has over 15 years of research experience in Cambodia and since 2017 has begun to undertake new collaborative work in the UK and Ireland. Home SOS is Katherine’s first monograph and follows the publication of co‐edited collections including Translocal Geographies (2011 with Ayona Datta), Geographies of Forced Eviction (2017 with Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia and Alex Vasudevan), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (2017 with Simon Springer), and The Handbook of Displacement (2020 with her RHUL colleagues). In recognition of research excellence, she was conferred the Gill Memorial Award by the Royal Geographical Society (RGS‐IBG) in 2014 and the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2016. She is editor of the journal Gender, Place and Culture and is former Chair of the RGS‐IBG Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group.
Series Editor’s Preface
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Acknowledgements
It is difficult to know where to start writing these acknowledgements. I first submitted the proposal for Home SOS in 2012, and eight years on, its journey into print has finally come to an end. This end point has only been made possible through sustained, and much appreciated, professional and personal guidance and support.
The book would not exist without the time, generosity and emotional energy of participants in sharing their stories of domestic life in Cambodia. It has been an honour and a privilege to listen to and write about their intimate experiences in Home SOS. The four studies the book is based on have been made possible by the interpreters and research assistants I have worked with – young and inspiring Cambodians who I am incredibly grateful to for their dedication and kindness. I feel saddened and torn that I cannot name them here given the political sensitivities of the book, which have only intensified over the course of writing it. I am also grateful to the many photographers who have allowed me to use their images free of charge in the book to provide the reader with a visual sense of home precarities unfolding in Cambodia. The joint reporting of Cambodian and international journalists on forced eviction in national newspapers, now shut down or under new management, has been particularly helpful to understanding the frequency and impact of women’s activism in relation to Boeung Kak Lake.
Thank you to the RGS‐IBG Book Series for your expertise and understanding in bringing the book to fruition over such a long period of time. Thank you to Neil Coe and Dave Featherstone for providing constructive feedback at each stage, and to Jacqueline Scott for liaising with me for so many years.
The Leverhulme Trust has been instrumental in enabling the time to write the monograph. I would also like to thank the funders of the research, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Royal Geographical Society. The PhD research that forms the initial basis for Home SOS was supervised by Sylvia Chant at the London School of Economics. Thank you Sylvia for giving me the best start in my academic journey, for believing in me and for showing me what passion and drive can achieve. Since 2008 I have been a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London and having been home to my scholarly endeavours for over a decade, it is only fitting that I thank my colleagues, both academic and administrative, for the support offered.
In the academic community, I am also honoured to have had ongoing support from geographers who have read and commented on the many iterations of the book. Ruth Craggs is of especial note for having read drafts of each and every chapter, on multiple occasions. Since meeting for the first time at the Las Vegas AAG in 2009, I have rarely felt lonely in academia because of our friendship and our writing side‐by‐side across cafes in London. I am also grateful for the many writing retreats we have been on, memorably battling through snow to get there, and taking trips to garden centres as shared spaces of happiness in which to clear our heads. Writing retreats have been a key way I have managed to push the book substantively forward. Thank you Harriet Hawkins for our cherished writing retreats together, and for being such a positive and reassuring figure in the journey of this book. I have also benefitted from the insightful feedback given to me by James Tyner, Nithya Natarajan, and Laurie Parsons and which extended the book’s ambitions in the final year of its writing. The opportunity for honed thinking has also been facilitated by the feedback shared with me through departmental seminars at the University of Leicester, King’s College London and Durham University.
The long journey of the book’s coming to pass has arisen through personal circumstances that I could never have predicted when I began writing. Soon after returning from maternity leave in 2015 I was diagnosed with a rare cancer, Pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP), and took medical leave to undertake major surgical and chemotherapy treatment. As the disease is so rare, it is important that I use this opportunity to raise awareness of it (see Macmillan and Cancer Research UK web pages). Throughout my treatment, and in the years since, I have received practical and emotional advice from the PMP community of fellow survivors and its organisation run by carers and patients (https://www.pseudomyxomasurvivor.org). My being here is testament to the NHS and the dedicated surgeons and nurses at the Peritoneal Malignancy Institute at Basingstoke, who I want to sincerely thank. I would like to note Mr Sanjay Dayal, my lead consultant surgeon, and specialist nurse Vicki Pleavin‐Evans for being there, still, at the end of the phone with your wise words. Given the significance of the treatment, I would also like to thank Gary Walker and Crystal Sutar at Grafton Tennis Club for working with me slowly, but