Alexandra Kent

Social Anthropology
PhD, Associated professor

About

Alexandra Kent holds a Masters degree in Social Anthropology from Edinburgh University. Her Masters dissertation was based upon fieldwork carried out in a South Indian village exploring Hindu domestic ritual. She conducted her doctoral studies at Gothenburg University and completed her doctoral dissertation in 2000. The research that this was based on concerned a neo-Hindu revitalisation movement in Malaysia; the study explored the political and ethnic dimensions of the movement in the context of Malaysian Islamisation.

Areas of interest

Alexandra Kent’s research has been conducted in South Asia and Southeast Asia. She has worked in India, Malaysia and Cambodia and in each case her work has examined various aspects of religious activity. This has included exploring the interplay between religion and politics, religion in relation to trauma and healing, and the workings of gender in the realm of religion.

In the course of these studies she became increasingly interested in the ethnography of ‘security’ and began making use of indigenous understandings of moral and cosmic order to support a critical examination of current academic approaches to security. This interest inspired her to organise a conference in 2007 entitled “Culture and the Configuring of Security: using Asian perspectives to inform theoretical direction”.

Current research

Trying to Get it ‘Just’ Right: the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and Social Healing in Cambodia

This study is supported by the Swedish Research Council.
It uses critical anthropological approaches to examine the dynamic interplay between external, national and local actors in the context of the ongoing Khmer Rouge tribunal in Cambodia, exploring the relationships between these actors’ various notions and strategies of justice, moral reconstruction and social healing.

The Khmer Rouge Tribunal is pertinent since its contribution to peace-building in a country that has officially known “peace” for two decades is unclear and its benefit to the Rule of Law is questionable given that endemic corruption of the judiciary is widely known.

Understanding the interplay between macro-level reconciliation efforts (war tribunals, international law) and local forms and notions of ‘justice’ is acutely relevant for efforts to bring about social healing.

Teaching and tutoring

• Asian Studies
• Writing Academic English
• Global Health