PhD Oral Exam - Naomi Frost, History

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

During the period of Democratic Kampuchea, as Cambodia was renamed under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979), two million Cambodian people perished through violence, disease, and starvation. In the aftermath of Democratic Kampuchea, and due to Vietnamese occupation and civil war that followed, over half a million Cambodians sought refuge through immigration abroad, resettled, raised families and built communities across a global diaspora. This thesis explores the legacies and intergenerational memory of Cambodia’s past through the oral histories of the 1.5 and second generation who grew up in the Cambodian diaspora in Australia, Canada and the United States, and particularly, Melbourne, Victoria, Montreal, Quebec, and Long Beach, California. What meanings and what legacies do Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge past, and family histories of displacement and migration, hold in the diaspora fifty years after the Khmer Rouge took power? How are family narratives shared and engaged with by the children of Cambodian migrants and refugees, and what role does the next generation play in both negotiating and shaping narratives of Democratic Kampuchea and their own communities today?

My research explores how family narratives are, or are not, shared between generations, and how the 1.5 and second generation have learned, discovered, negotiated, retold, and are now re-shaping their own family and community histories. The life stories and memory work of the 1.5- and second-generation challenge damage-centred representations of their communities and of Cambodian history more broadly. I argue that historians need to look beyond survivors to understand the multigenerational significance of histories of displacement and violence. The next generation’s life stories reveal that the legacies of Cambodia’s past are not static, but dynamic and evolving within and across the global diaspora. These legacies, inherited through stories, silences, and fragments, are not only embodied but transformed in the life stories, memory work, and community mobilization of the next generations. In this sense, intergenerational memory emerges not as a unidirectional inheritance of the past, but as an ongoing process that evolves as the next generations imbue the past with new meanings in the present.