The sensemaking literature offered important critical insights to the understanding of organizing. These have been underpinned by two foundational assumptions. First, sensemaking is predominantly a ...higher order cognitive process. Second, it is a process desired and desirable. Considering the account of Vann Nath as prisoner of the S‐21 extermination center during the Khmer Rouge regime, we challenge these assumptions and argue that, in some cases, sensemaking is fundamentally a bodily and emotional process, one that is undesired and blocked by the organization in which it takes place. The shift in perspective triggered by an extreme context has pertinent implications for the understanding of sensemaking in other, non‐extreme organizational circumstances.
A high school the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison under the code-name S-21 between 1976 and 1979, then a genocide museum opened to visitors in 1979, Tuol Sleng is nowadays a major site of Cambodian ...heritage. Every year several thousand people, foreign tourists and Cambodians alike, visit the place. How was Tuol Sleng established, in what context and for what purpose? The transformation of the prison into a memorial museum is deeply related to an extraordinary justice process (the People’s Revolutionary Tribunal, which sentenced to death in absentia two former leaders of Democratic Kampuchea, Pol Pot and Ieng Sary), the new authorities’ dire need of domestic and international legitimacy, and the will to represent and identify the victims of the former regime. Memorialization went hand in hand with the elaboration of a national narrative that a majority of Cambodians could accept in spite of the limitations of this narrative and the propaganda around it. The territory chosen to build this heritage is very small compared to the actual territory of S-21. In this sense, it is emblematic of the parts of history that were discarded in the process. The population returning to Phnom Penh after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime appropriated the neighborhood anew. Lately, these people’s recollections and the traces the past left in the landscape have become an object of research. They open up new perspectives of inquiry regarding the museum, and consequently Cambodian heritage.
During the Khmer Rouge's brutal reign in Cambodia during the mid-to-late 1970s, a former math teacher named Duch served as the commandant of the S-21 security center, where as many as 20,000 victims ...were interrogated, tortured, and executed. In 2009 Duch stood trial for these crimes against humanity. While the prosecution painted Duch as evil, his defense lawyers claimed he simply followed orders. In Man or Monster? Alexander Hinton uses creative ethnographic writing, extensive fieldwork, hundreds of interviews, and his experience attending Duch's trial to create a nuanced analysis of Duch, the tribunal, the Khmer Rouge, and the after-effects of Cambodia's genocide. Interested in how a person becomes a torturer and executioner as well as the law's ability to grapple with crimes against humanity, Hinton adapts Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil" to consider how the potential for violence is embedded in the everyday ways people articulate meaning and comprehend the world. Man or Monster? provides novel ways to consider justice, terror, genocide, memory, truth, and humanity.
‘Delve into the dark side of Cambodian history with a visit to Tuol Sleng Museum, essential to understanding the pain of the past’, Lonely Planet Cambodia claims. During the Khmer Rouge regime ...(1975–9) the Tuol Svay Prey high school in Phnom Penh was used under the codename S21 as a torture-and-execution centre. In 1979, the government of the newly established People’s Republic of Kampuchea had it refurbished as memorial. Today, people from all over the world visit Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and shoot videos and photos they later on post on blogs, Facebook pages and other social media. This article explores how social networks affect the production, distribution, and consumption of Tuol Sleng as site of memory. It focuses on two digital platforms: Flickr and YouTube. The article is divided into three parts. First it examines how Flickr and YouTube can be used as inadvertent archives providing material for a visual history of Tuol Sleng. Second, it analyses the processes of remediation people resort to for communicating and sharing their experience in the museum. Finally, it explores the mechanisms of community building, and their limited effects, as users watch and comment on these accounts of Tuol Sleng.
La large utilisation du sleng (сленг) est l’une des évolutions les plus notables du russe contemporain. Son emploi sur Internet est d’autant plus remarquable qu’il permet de traiter de thèmes ...actuels, qui ne sont pas forcément intégrés dans la langue standard. À ce titre il devient impératif d’étudier le sleng en tant qu’élément constitutif de la langue russe. N’ayant pas de définition claire du sleng, nous analysons ce terme, en mettant en évidence sa place spécifique, notamment, par rapport au žargon, à l’argo et au dialekt. La particularité essentielle du sleng réside dans sa diffusion généralisée à de larges ensembles russophones, indépendamment de leur niveau socio-culturel. L’examen du contexte de l’utilisation du sleng sur Internet, selon la vision de Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni du schéma des fonctions de Roman Jakobson, démontre que le locuteur du sleng est un internaute russophone moyen qui en fait un usage quotidien. Enfin, la typologie du sleng selon le schéma des fonctions de Jakobson nous permet de structurer les éléments selon le rôle qu’ils jouent dans la communication en ligne et nous donne une vision globale de la place du sleng sur Internet et dans le russe contemporain en général. Nous constatons que les fonctions référentielle, expressive et poétique témoignent d’un niveau de la richesse du contenu élevé, tandis que d’autres fonctions sont présentées de façon moindre. Ce fait prouve que le sleng s’appuie sur la langue standard et l’enrichit sans vraiment s’y opposer ou chercher de la recréer.La présente thèse a ainsi l’ambition de poser quelques jalons théoriques permettant, par la suite, d’aborder d’autres problématiques liées au sleng russe.
The large usage of sleng (transliteration from сленг) is one of the important characteristics of modern Russian. Its employment is even more evident on the Internet, as it allows to describe the subjects of the modern life that are not covered by the standard language. It is thus essential to study sleng as an important element of Russian language.As the clear definition of sleng does not yet exist, we analyse this term, showing its specific role in comparison to other terms, such as žargon, argo and dialekt. The main particularity of sleng is its general usage by wide ranges of Russian speakers without distinction of their social or cultural level.The study of the context of the sleng usage on the Internet, according to the vision of Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni of the Jakobson's functions of language, shows that a sleng speaker is a standard Russian Internet user, who uses sleng on a daily basis.Finally, the typology of sleng based on the Jakobson's functions of language allows us to structure elements following the role they play in Internet communication and offers us the global vision of the place that takes sleng on the Internet and more generally in modern Russian. We establish that referential, emotive and poetic functions are highly represented in sleng, whereas other functions attest just a minimal content volume in sleng. This fact proves that the sleng relies on the standard language and enriches it without opposing to it or trying to recreate it.The goal of the present thesis is to create a theoretical basis that will help future studies of other subjects related to the Russian sleng.
Roughly 1.7 million people died in Cambodia from untreated disease, starvation, and execution during the Khmer Rouge reign of less than four years in the late 1970s. The regime’s brutality has come ...to be symbolized by the multitude of black-and-white mug shots of prisoners taken at the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, where thousands of “enemies of the state” were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. In Archiving the Unspeakable , Michelle Caswell traces the social life of these photographic records through the lens of archival studies and elucidates how, paradoxically, they have become agents of silence and witnessing, human rights and injustice as they are deployed at various moments in time and space. From their creation as Khmer Rouge administrative records to their transformation beginning in 1979 into museum displays, archival collections, and databases, the mug shots are key components in an ongoing drama of unimaginable human suffering.
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the motives and emotions of Western tourists visiting Tuol Sleng Genocide Prison Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and further contribute to a deeper ...understanding of the dark tourism consumption. Design/methodology/approach Data were collected from popular travel blog sites. This study employs various qualitative and quantitative methods, such as netnography, semantic network analysis and critical content analysis in order to gain a deeper insight into the visitors' emotions and motivations. Findings This study reveals that people visit Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum mainly for "remembrance", "worth visiting", "learning and understanding", "paying respect" and a "must visit" attraction. Emotions revealed in this study were "shocking", "sadness", "horror" and "depressive". Research limitations/implications This paper is limited to the analyses of travel blogs sites. Further research could include interviews with Western visitors, and professionals managing the site. Originality/value To the best of the knowledge, this is the first study to examine the emotions of visitors in Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.
Most discourses on victims in international criminal justice take the subject of victims for granted, as an identity and category existing exogenously to the judicial process. This book takes a ...different approach. Through a close reading of the institutional practices of one particular court, it demonstrates how court practices produce the subjectivity of the victim, a subjectivity that is profoundly of law and endogenous to the enterprise of international criminal justice. Furthermore, by situating these figurations within the larger aspirations of the court, the book shows how victims have come to constitute and represent the link between international criminal law and the enterprise of transitional justice. The book takes as its primary example the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal as it is also called. Focusing on the representation of victims in crimes against humanity, victim participation and photographic images, the book engages with a range of debates and scholarship in law, feminist theory and cultural legal theory. Furthermore, by paying attention to a broader range of institutional practices, Figuring Victims makes an innovative scholarly contribution to the debates on the roles and purposes of international criminal justice.
Theorists have argued that the "attempt to comprehend" the genocidal event represented by Auschwitz has "defeated the intellects of countless men and women". Memorials at Auschwitz and other ...concentration camps such as Dachau and Buchenwald, and to a certain extent those outside of Europe, such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek in Cambodia, are attempts to call attention to these atrocities in the hope of preventing the repetition of their like. Yet these projects, like all historical monuments and memorials, face the problem of a certain coldness and indifference caused by historical distance, consumerist culture and the seemingly abstract nature of historical images and documents. Concentration camp memorials are not entirely immune from these problems. However, in their use of an embodied semiotics invoking the visitor's own body as a direct participant in immersive environments, sensory surfaces and displays, these memorials engage - not unproblematically - in a project to realize this history in visceral and concrete ways. This paper examines the semiotic strategies of the concentration camp as a technique of "embodying" suffering that is intended to counter the dissipation of affect in a media-saturated consumerist era.
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