My current and future research projects focus on three overarching questions:
- How do state interventions into the lives of migrant children generate zones of liminality where their rights and belonging are partially recognized?
- How do age and life stages intersect with other dimensions of social life, such as gender, class, ethnicity, language, and migrancy status?
- How can we as researchers observe the collusion between nationhood and mobility in institutions and on media platforms mobilized by children and youths?
Current projects
I am working on my book manuscript tentatively titled, “Gradients of Childhood: Thai Schooling, National Imaginaries, and the Figuration of the Migrant Child.” The project explores the liminality of children of Burmese migrants in Thailand. Although they are not recognized as full citizens by the Thai state and mainstream society, their participation in formal schooling and language learning offers them opportunities to engage in some areas of civic and political life, from which migrant workers are normally excluded. My research examines how the children’s “neither-here-nor-there” subjectivity does not exist prior to their schooling experiences. Rather, this kind of liminal subjectivity emerges when local institutions and authorities, in order to comply with state demands, strive to situate the children in Thai bureaucratic systems, ethnonational hierarchies, and discourses of normative childhoods. In such circumstances, migrant children negotiate their perceived foreignness and belonging with respect to age, bureaucratic status, names, language skills, clothing, and comportment. In exploring how schooling reinforces migrant children’s liminality, I argue that the partial integration of migrant children into society via schooling allows the Thai nation to continually benefit from global labor flows while simultaneously deferring the children’s right to enter a post-liminal state of citizenship.
In addition to my book project, I am now writing an article that explores how youth-led protests in virtual spaces transform the Thai state’s propagandistic artifacts into parodies and satires. Following Bakhtin’s (1984) conception of carnivalesque, I explore how social media serves as a site where folk humor, youth language, and popular cultures emerge as subversive forces that destabilize rigid, officialized, and uniform social systems. My analysis is guided by two questions. First, what are the strategies of resistance that young digital protestors in today’s Thailand use to challenge the voice of authority? Second, how does the figure of children become a powerful medium and object for political claim-making? The study of such media artifacts suggests that the ongoing youth uprising is explicitly and creatively questioning cultural assumptions surrounding notions of dek, “child”, versus phuyai, “adult” (literally, “big person”) that structures different scales of power relations in Thai society.
Future project
For my next project, I plan to study government-sponsored scholarship programs that send promising young Thais to study overseas, especially to pursue higher education, in anticipation of their return to build a “modern, civilized” nation on par with the West.
In this project, my analytic focuses on the concept of “return.” My project asks: (1) How do we conceptualize “return,” not simply as an act of going back, but an anticipation and an imagination shaped by state strategies to control the mobility of its citizens? (2) How does the anticipated return shape young Thais’ experience as student migrants in the United States? (3) How do we understand migration not only as spatial movement, but also a process of “growing up”? In addition, I examine how such processes are complicated by the dual demand to keep up with Western educational standards and to fulfil social and moral obligations as Thai citizens. With an emphasis on migrant student experiences, I will explore how nationalism is built and negotiated through mobility and alterity and how one needs to be a migrant before a model citizen. Concurrently, I will study the positioning of these students within local modes of ethnic, racial, class, and linguistic differentiation in their host countries, with an emphasis on Thai students in the United States.