This value also influences the choice of majors and careers. Vutha said that he likes to work in helping people, and he hopes that his work will bring about greater social change. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in public administration, Vutha continued to study for a master's degree with the aid of an American scholarship. After completing the credits in the first year, he had already confirmed his research concern and selected the thesis topic and supervisor early.
However, because the title of the thesis "Illegal Image Manipulation Service Logging, Deforestation and Forced Eviction in Cambodia" was too sensitive, after the research materials and interviews were collected and the first draft had already been written, the professor who was co-supervisor was afraid of being implicated, so he suddenly refused the guidance and asked Vutha Signed voluntary withdrawal and thus did not obtain a master's degree. Later, Vutha was exposed to many indirect personal safety threats because of his work in a human rights organization, studying the plight of aboriginal people, teaching farmers to use GPS positioning on smartphones, and taking pictures, photographs, and texts to record the situation of illegal logging and forced evictions. Workers in the field of human rights, even though they have some overlap with each other, will not admit to knowing each other when asked by strangers, so as to avoid getting into trouble.
Therefore, Vutha admitted that on certain issues, it is safer to write in a foreign language than Cambodian. In this sense, a foreign language is not only a channel for external communication and understanding of the world; internally, it is a voice tool that bypasses speech censorship and finds gaps in freedom of speech. 2-06_(1) Photo Credit: Vutha The international organization RCTS/SEAOAN (Cambodia Rural Science and Technology Support Organization), where Vutha works, teaches farmers to use ICT (Information and Communication Technology) to become citizen journalists, exposing illegal logging and mining, land occupation and forced eviction in the village, which damage the environment and invade human rights behavior.