Manuscript by Courtney Work
Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2026
This Critical Reflection problematizes the notion of a collective 'we' who cannot seem to achieve... more This Critical Reflection problematizes the notion of a collective 'we' who cannot seem to achieve sustainability. The fiction of this notion creates a split in that we, between the simultaneous existence of a 'comfortable we' and an unmarked collective of that same 'we' which makes their comfort possible. It is the 'comfortable we' who seem unable to achieve sustainability. While it remains difficult to look at the unsustainable luxury of the 'comfortable we' and not desire it too, its costs are becoming increasingly visible. What my twenty years working at the resource frontier in Cambodia, where forest economies give way to the market, have shown me is that there seem to be no winners in this game. There are victims and there are perpetrators, each traumatized in different ways. I argue that the deep historical melancholy of 'civilization' is born of real trauma, the effects of which have been passed through generations of the privileged as well as the human labourers and the more-than-human world of mountains, rivers, and other species who make their privilege possible. The 'global we' certainly exists, but it includes far more actors than are currently acknowledged by the 'comfortable we', who are riddled with a deep and barely recognized anxiety.
The Combustion of the World: Authchtones people, conservation and the commodification of nature in Southeast Asia, 2026
Climate Change politics gives rise to shifting forms of green colonialism the effects of which ca... more Climate Change politics gives rise to shifting forms of green colonialism the effects of which can be at once surprising and predictable. The following paper analyzes the life of two Korea-Cambodia partnership projects designed to increase forest cover in a rapidly deforesting Cambodia. This paper updates earlier case studies (Scheidel and Work, 2016; Work, 2017) and follows the life of these two projects. The first is a REDD+ project and the second is an afforestation/reforestation (AR) project situated respectively at the southwest and northeast boundaries of the Prey Lang Wildlife Sanctuary (PLWS) in north-central Cambodia between the Mekong River and the Tonle Sap Lake. Both projects were conceived and justified within the logics of climate change politics and the green economy (Fairhead, Leach, and Scoones, 2012; Franco and Borras, 2021).
Tides of Empire: Religion, Development, and Environment in Cambodia
“The book contains exciting discussions, especially for studying religion and environment…It is a... more “The book contains exciting discussions, especially for studying religion and environment…It is a provocative book that promises to reopen debates about state–society–environment arrangements in Cambodia both past and present and to enrich the anthropological study of human–nature relationships.” • South East Asia Research
“Tides of Empire is a provocative book that advances long submerged connections among state development, layered religious practices, and ecological or place-making endeavors in Southeast Asia.” • Lorraine V. Aragon, University of North Carolina
At the forested edge of Cambodia’s development frontier, the infrastructures of global development engulf the land and existing social practices like an incoming tide. Cambodia’s distinctive history of imperial surge and rupture makes it easier to see the remains of earlier tides, which are embedded in the physical landscape, and also floating about in the solidifying boundaries of religious, economic, and political classifications. Using stories from the hybrid population of settler-farmers, loggers, and soldiers, all cutting new social realities from the water and the land, this book illuminates the contradictions and continuities in what the author suggests is the final tide of empire.
Papers by Courtney Work
Palgrave Handbook of Political Norms, 2024
Journal of Political Ecology, 2024
At the resource frontier of Prey Lang Forest in Cambodia, a new food regime marks multiple rifts ... more At the resource frontier of Prey Lang Forest in Cambodia, a new food regime marks multiple rifts in the social fabric. As the forest gives way to rural road development, migrant incursions, and cash cropping, long-term residents lament the paucity of available food. At the same time, new migrants suggest that there is now more food than ever. Based on how food is defined, we find one food, motofish, that emerged as a significant semiotic sign. It is a fish, regardless of species, that is farm-raised and carried from the market to the village by motorbike. It is opposed to a real fish that grows by itself in a river or stream. Long-term Kuy and Khmer residents of the forest see the fish as a sign of destruction and loss, because there are so few fish in the rivers and streams. New migrants see motofish as part of a new abundance coming to this remote corner of the world where there used to be no food. This abundance is facilitated by Cambodia's growing fish farming industry, fed by wild-harvested 'trashfish' and subsidized soy pellets. Motofish is more than a sign of gastropolitics, as it marks a rift in the semiotic landscape through which individual and collective worlds emerge. We use this worldmaking fish to launch a discussion of both the epistemic and metabolic rifts of agrarian transformation and how these rifts are interpreted by different actors in the same landscape: One that recognizes the metabolic rift and the other that carries with them its epistemic cleansing.
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Manuscript by Courtney Work
“Tides of Empire is a provocative book that advances long submerged connections among state development, layered religious practices, and ecological or place-making endeavors in Southeast Asia.” • Lorraine V. Aragon, University of North Carolina
At the forested edge of Cambodia’s development frontier, the infrastructures of global development engulf the land and existing social practices like an incoming tide. Cambodia’s distinctive history of imperial surge and rupture makes it easier to see the remains of earlier tides, which are embedded in the physical landscape, and also floating about in the solidifying boundaries of religious, economic, and political classifications. Using stories from the hybrid population of settler-farmers, loggers, and soldiers, all cutting new social realities from the water and the land, this book illuminates the contradictions and continuities in what the author suggests is the final tide of empire.
Papers by Courtney Work