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Taken together, the four projects I have outlined are marked by a series of overarching methodological approaches. First, the material presented in the book brings together and scans across a 16‐year horizon that is complementary to feminist geography research and emphasises the benefits of sustained engagement, of long‐term relationships, and commitments to particular groups of people or issues (McDowell 2001; Valentine 2005). It is not only that my arguments are based on a larger volume of interviews than individual studies might yield (over 300 in total) but that their undertaking over more than a decade gives rise to insights that go beyond snapshots of time. As Clare Madge et al. (1997, p. 96) note, longitudinal studies are valuable ‘because the research is not fixed in time but reflects the dynamism of people’s experiences, so enabling temporal differences’ to be comprehended (see also Sou and Webber 2019). The influence of Orm’s life story, followed from 2004 until 2013 inspired, for example, the shape of my research in the years that followed in this book. Learning from her twin experiences of marital breakdown and forced eviction, cemented my thinking that rather than discuss domestic violence and forced eviction in isolation from each other, it was important to trace and understand their connective tissue. Being attentive to individual as well as collective trajectories in a country in flux offers the ability to explore how women’s lives and those of their families are swept up with Cambodia’s transition – ‘to tell a story capable of engaging and countering the violence of abstraction’ (Hartman cited in Saunders 2008, p. 7). Inspired by Orm, the book is therefore less reactive to, and more reflective on, the (un)eventful and women’s survival-work on a daily and long‐term basis. The book’s ability to capture the slow violences, less perceptible traces, and repeated articulations of injustice in Cambodian society are heightened through this approach. They provide a fuller and more cumulative story about the violences encountered in domestic life than might otherwise have been possible. Furthermore, given that violence is ‘a processual and unfolding moment, rather than an “act” or “outcome”’ (Springer and Le Billon 2016, p. 2), the longitudinal allows the book to transcend the singular event and moment to demonstrate the processing and unfolding nature of violence.

Second, the book draws out the experiences of ever‐married Khmer women from the wider data set of participants possible from the four studies.¹¹ Albeit selective, this approach aims to ensure that histories of women in Cambodia are told not only through the more formal realms of female politicians (Lilja 2008) or Buddhist nuns (Kent 2011a, 2011b) but also through more informal spheres of political power tied to the marital realm. The book’s focus on the Cambodian housewife as domestic violence survivor and grassroots activist contributes to seminal work on the history of women and power in the country (Jacobsen 2008). It works to ensure that as domestic figures they are not written out of history either as unexceptional or rebel figures who are trivialised and/or derided in the popular or scholarly imagination. My pivot around marriage and its breakdown also arises from what is described as ‘the near universality of marriage in Cambodian society’ (National Institute of Statistics (NIS) et al. 2014, p. 98). Reflecting the wider centrality of marriage in Asia (Piper and Lee 2016), figures record that the proportion of women in Cambodia who have never married decreases with age to a low of only 4% among those aged 45–49 (NIS et al. 2014, p. 98). While this ubiquity does not mean that I exclude other perspectives and voices from the data in the book, it does mean that Home SOS foregrounds the violences visited upon, and told through, the narratives of middle‐aged women who have been, at one point, in a spousal relationship.

Third, each of the projects outlined has been driven by a commitment to in‐depth qualitative research, namely interviews, to better understand ‘geographies that wound’ (Philo 2005) both in terms of their affliction and treatment. In the face of what Russell Hitchings (2012) has identified in human geography as a growing hesitance about interviews to research everyday life, I reaffirm the vital and enduring role of ‘talk’ for learning about domestic life and its ruptures. This falls in line with feminist geographical research which has a long history of engagement with interviews (Longhurst 2016). Given potential suppression and eradication of victims’ capacity for speech within and beyond the Cambodian family, interviews encourage the narration of stories to communicate their experiences. These recorded Khmer language interviews were transcribed and then translated verbatim into English by research assistants I worked closely with in each project. In my doctoral research, I had a basic command of Khmer, and worked with two male interpreters who were students at the time, and who supported my broad‐brush explorations of household life. Female research assistants undertook the marriage dissolution and forced eviction research with me. Meanwhile, following World Health Organization (WHO) guidelines on the ethical conduct of research on domestic violence, the interview team in the larger DV law study included one male and one female research assistant who carried out the research with male and female respondents (respectively) after a period of training, piloting, and initial in‐the‐field supervision. At the start of each interview informed‐consent was recorded on the digital voice recorder, and with my more sensitive postdoctoral research, it was explained to respondents that if at any point they felt distressed and wanted to change the subject (or stop the interview), then this was acceptable. Information on NGO assistance was additionally given to two participants who requested legal help in the DV law study.