Reduced 'fates of the body' and 'production of value for others' in the global garment industry: Thinking with Berlant on eating and hunger during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, suspended and laid off garment workers struggled on severely reduced incomes to meet the cost of food for themselves and their families. It is in this context of 'double crisis' that our commentary focuses on the diminished eating and reduced bodily fates of garment workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. We argue that thinking with Berlant encourages and supports scholars to contemplate and articulate how the 'production of value for others' can reduce the 'fates of the body' of those living and labouring at the sharp end of the capitalist system.

Compounding crises of social reproduction: Microfinance, over-indebtedness and the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has hit at a time when microfinance is at its historical peak, with an estimated 139 million microfinance customers globally. Cambodia's microfinance sector is one of the fastest growing, and like others in the Global South has moved from offering entrepreneurial capital to everyday liquidity, and even disaster relief. In this Viewpoint, however, we argue that the promotion of microfinance as market-based relief and recovery from the pandemic should be a source of concern, not comfort.

Gendered violences and rule of/by law in Cambodia.

This intervention is based on research in Cambodia on domestic violence and forced eviction. It draws on the distinction between rule of/by law to examine women's experiences of rights claiming. While 'rule law' is a value to be respected and a mechanism via which to guarantee justice and human rights to all citizens, 'rule law' is a distortion that is more easily conceived of as an instrument of power and oppression.

Clouding the Judgment of Domestic Violence Law: Victim Blaming by Institutional Stakeholders in Cambodia.

This article examines victims' purported complicity in the judicial failures of domestic violence law to protect them in Cambodia. It is based on 3 years (2012-2014) of research in Siem Reap and Pursat Provinces on the everyday politics of the 2005 "Law on the Prevention of Domestic Violence and the Protection of the Victims" (DV Law). The project questioned why investments in DV Law are faltering and took a multi-stakeholder approach to do so.

"We don't forget the old rice pot when we get the new one": discourses on ideals and practices of women in contemporary Cambodia.

Drawing on microlevel research with men and women of differing ages living in rural and urban Siem Reap (home to the global heritage and tourist site of Angkor), this article focuses on the key discourses and practices that men and women draw on to (de)stabilize putatively traditional ideals of Cambodian womanhood and to (re)situate them in the contemporary period. Mapping the complex ways that people represent, make sense of, and respond to prerevolutionary cultural norms of female behavior in a very different era (with particular, though not exclusive, attention paid to mobility and education), the article demonstrates how deeper ideological changes concerning women’s relationship to Khmer tradition will have to accompany the surface reordering of Cambodian gender relations if equality between women and men is to be achieved. Until then, the ideal woman in contemporary Cambodian society is ultimately one who can creatively negotiate and balance the multiple demands placed on her by society, family, and self.