Sirijit Sunanta | Mahidol University (original) (raw)
Papers by Sirijit Sunanta
Gender, Place & Culture
The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president ... more The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president of Thai Women Network in Europe (TWNE), was originally conducted in English over email by Sirijit Sunanta and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot in July 2022. It was supplemented by an online interview (via WebEx) in Thai by Sirijit Sunanta in November 2022. Mrs. Grimsmann served as the President of TWNE from 2019 to 2022. TWNE is well-established and one of the most active organizations of Thai migrant women with individual and organizational members in 16 European countries, the US, and Thailand. TWNE seeks to collaborate with governmental and non-governmental organizations, both in Thailand and the destination countries, to improve the welfare of Thai migrant women. They organize annual general meetings to discuss topics relevant to Thai migrant women's lives in destination countries and publish an annual newsletter Sarn Satree (สารสตรี) to circulate information. Mrs. Grimsmann has extensive experience of providing community service as a social volunteer and working with international organizations, particularly in the area of women and children's welfare. She is now based in France and Thailand.
The migration flows connecting Thailand and Europe have constructed social spaces in which differ... more The migration flows connecting Thailand and Europe have constructed social spaces in which different stereotypes regarding Thais and Europeans emerge, perpetuate, and circulate, thereby affecting to various extents the lives of these individuals. To challenge these stereotypes, the present special issue takes into account the mechanisms of social categorization at transnational and local dimensions in three critical steps. First, it adopts an inclusive stance by not limiting itself to heterosexual relationships involving Thais and Europeans. Second, it shifts the scholarly gaze from marriage and family issues to Thai migrants' mobilities in spatial, social, and intergenerational terms. And third, it highlights Thai migrants' engagement in the labor market as intimate workers and entrepreneurs to uncover the factors shaping their (re)productive labor and social incorporation in their receiving countries. Using an intersectional approach, this special issue presents six empirically grounded case studies to unveil often-neglected dimensions and complexities of Europe-Thailand transnational migration.
This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 interviews with Thai... more This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 interviews with Thai migrants in Brighton, East Sussex. It explores how Thai immigrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and migration pathways mobilize ethnic and non-ethnic forms of capital in their entrepreneurial activities. Thai immigrants constitute a relatively new, small, but internally diverse migrant population in the UK, with female marriage migrants dominating the Thai migrant population in the past two decades. The findings of this study reveal that Thai migrants tend to own small-scale businesses or provide personal services in three sectors: cleaning and care work, beauty and massage, and food and catering. In their interaction with opportunity structures in the UK, Thai restaurant and massage entrepreneurs mobilize the exotic notion of "Thai-ness" to add value to their services catering to local British customers.
The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration
Retirement Migration to the Global South
This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist ... more This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist beach city on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand, using lifestyle migration as a theoretical framework. The data are based on six months of ethnographic study of German communities and in-depth interviews with twelve German migrants in Pattaya. We argue that German migration to Pattaya can be conceptualized as lifestyle migration since it is a move of individuals from a more developed country to a less developed one in search of a better life. Consistent with the narrative of lifestyle migration, German migrants in Pattaya cite negative circumstances before migration and a better life after migration as their motivation. In addition, findings reveal that relationships with Thai women play an important role in the migration of German migrants, who are predominantly older males, to Pattaya. This indicates that in the case of German migration to Pattaya, lifestyle migration is gendered and closely linked to marriage migration.
Globalization literature underscores the flows of people, information, technologies, capital and ... more Globalization literature underscores the flows of people, information, technologies, capital and ideas across national borders (Appadurai 1996). The contact between cultures following these transnational flows has resulted in the widespread exchange and transformation of cultural forms (Appadurai 1996, Featherstone 1995).
Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, 2007
The proliferation of introduction-for-marriage websites has contributed to the growth of cross-bo... more The proliferation of introduction-for-marriage websites has contributed to the growth of cross-border marriages and the so-called mail-order bride phenomenon that shape gendered migration patterns. Drawing from content and discourse analyses of six websites featuring prospective brides from the Philippines and Thailand, this paper explores how the distinctive characteristics of Thai and Filipino women’s representation on intermarriage websites are shaped by Thailand’s and the Philippines’ history and economy. It explains how and why the representation of Thai and Filipino women on intermarriage websites involves power and violence, both symbolic power at the representational level and physical violence in the material world, thus creating unequal Third World-First World power relations that are embedded in international migration circuits. Drawing from postcolonial cultural studies and feminist media theories, it delineates the representational, symbolic, and material forms of power...
Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
Filipino teachers have become the largest group of foreign teachers in Thailand as English langua... more Filipino teachers have become the largest group of foreign teachers in Thailand as English language education gains increasing importance in the kingdom. Their migratory experience, however, demonstrates that schools favour white native English speakers (NES) over them. Differential treatments of Filipino and white NES teachers in Thai schools are manifested overtly in the form of a pay gap and in more subtle micropolitics of bodily management. By examining a postcolonial view and the notion of English language teaching as aesthetic labour, Filipino teachers are found to face racialized and gendered discrimination in English language education in Thailand.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
This article explains why significant Thai-Western 'both-ways' migration pathways have evolved, g... more This article explains why significant Thai-Western 'both-ways' migration pathways have evolved, grown and sustained over the last decades. It introduces a set of research contributions on transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and 'the West'countries from Europe, North America and Australia. While Thai and Western people's social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, we consider it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Specifically, we argue that the growing 'bothways' Thai-Western migration pathways can only be understood by reference to three features of globalisation processes specific to Thailand: first, cross-border connections and social networks generated by massive West-to-Thailand tourist mobilities that incentivise Western men to see living permanently with a Thai partner as 'realistic'; second, the radical transformations of Thai rural societies under conditions of economic development that produces 'surplus' mobile women; and third, the restrictive state immigration and citizenship regimes in the West and Thailand that leaves few pathways open for migration, other than by 'marriage'. In sum, Thailand's specific experience of globalisation is the explanatory backstory to the extraordinary prevalence of Thai-Western 'both-ways' migrations.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
ABSTRACT This paper examines the global trade of Thai tourism and related service industries such... more ABSTRACT This paper examines the global trade of Thai tourism and related service industries such as restaurant, spa and hospital – service activities in which the body and bodily emotions of both service consumers and providers are central. I will demonstrate how the Thai state and private sector market Thai services to the world and construct Thailand as a destination for bodily and spiritual fulfilment. Analysing Thailand as an exporter of care and body labour, this article highlights the important role the nation-state and local socioeconomic structures play in shaping global care chains. State policy that promotes tourism and related service industries as a key economic development strategy has shaped current interrelated forms of transnational mobilities between Thailand and more affluent countries – marriage migration, health and medical tourism, and retirement migration. I also explore the interface between Thai state policies on the export of care and lived experiences of Thailand-Europe transnational migrants. Through their occupation choices, marital relocation decisions and care arrangements, Thai migrants in Europe and European migrants in Thailand both resist and reproduce the commodification of care and body work.
Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third …, 2007
Tourism Analysis
The craft beer movement and craft beer tourism are a new global phenomenon that has reached vario... more The craft beer movement and craft beer tourism are a new global phenomenon that has reached various parts of the world. However, the literature on craft beer tourism mostly focuses on traditional origins of craft beer in Western countries—the US, Australia, and European countries. This research note illustrates how a study of the Thai craft beer movement and craft beer tourism could contribute to the existing body of knowledge. The consumption of non-Western people in non-Western places has been underrepresented in the literature of food and beverage tourism. The craft beer movement has spread to Thailand via urban middle-class Thais who brought the passion for and knowledge of home brewing from the West to Thailand. Brewing lessons, brewery visits, and craft beer events/ festivals have functioned as community building activities for Thai craft beer enthusiasts as well as the main craft beer distribution channel. Craft beer consumption continues to grow despite the Thai alcoholic pr...
This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist ... more This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist beach city on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand, using lifestyle migration as a theoretical framework. The data are based on six months of ethnographic study of German communities and in-depth interviews with twelve German migrants in Pattaya. We argue that German migration to Pattaya can be conceptualized as lifestyle migration since it is a move of individuals from a more developed country to a less developed one in search of a better life. Consistent with the narrative of lifestyle migration, German migrants in Pattaya cite negative circumstances before migration and a better life after migration as their motivation. In addition, findings reveal that relationships with Thai women play an important role in the migration of German migrants, who are predominantly older males, to Pattaya. This indicates that in the case of German migration to Pattaya, lifestyle migration is gendered ...
Annals of Tourism Research, 2017
The purpose of this research is to investigate the gendered economy of ethnic minority souvenir v... more The purpose of this research is to investigate the gendered economy of ethnic minority souvenir vending in Thailand’s urban and coastal tourist areas. Increasing numbers of the Akha minority group have migrated towards tourist hotspots to engage in urban souvenir vending. Ethnographic research shows that according to the Akha gender division of labour, souvenir production and distribution are considered women’s work. Peddling on foot, female Akha souvenir vendors are at the bottom of the informal tourism economy. It is shown that urban ethnic tourism primarily reproduces gender asymmetry in the division of work and that contestations of gender roles prove to be difficult. Mobile street vending enables ethnic minority women to become breadwinners of households but simultaneously reinforces gender inequality.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020
This article explains why significant Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have evolved, g... more This article explains why significant Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have evolved, grown and sustained over the last decades. It introduces a set of research contributions on transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’ – countries from Europe, North America and Australia. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, we consider it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Specifically, we argue that the growing ‘both-ways’ Thai-Western migration pathways can only be understood by reference to three features of globalisation processes specific to Thailand: first, cross-border connections and social networks generated by massive West-to-Thailand tourist mobilities that incentivise Western men to see living permanently with ...
Gender, Place & Culture
The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president ... more The interview with Mrs. Chongcharoen Sornkaew Grimsmann, a long-term member and former president of Thai Women Network in Europe (TWNE), was originally conducted in English over email by Sirijit Sunanta and Asuncion Fresnoza-Flot in July 2022. It was supplemented by an online interview (via WebEx) in Thai by Sirijit Sunanta in November 2022. Mrs. Grimsmann served as the President of TWNE from 2019 to 2022. TWNE is well-established and one of the most active organizations of Thai migrant women with individual and organizational members in 16 European countries, the US, and Thailand. TWNE seeks to collaborate with governmental and non-governmental organizations, both in Thailand and the destination countries, to improve the welfare of Thai migrant women. They organize annual general meetings to discuss topics relevant to Thai migrant women's lives in destination countries and publish an annual newsletter Sarn Satree (สารสตรี) to circulate information. Mrs. Grimsmann has extensive experience of providing community service as a social volunteer and working with international organizations, particularly in the area of women and children's welfare. She is now based in France and Thailand.
The migration flows connecting Thailand and Europe have constructed social spaces in which differ... more The migration flows connecting Thailand and Europe have constructed social spaces in which different stereotypes regarding Thais and Europeans emerge, perpetuate, and circulate, thereby affecting to various extents the lives of these individuals. To challenge these stereotypes, the present special issue takes into account the mechanisms of social categorization at transnational and local dimensions in three critical steps. First, it adopts an inclusive stance by not limiting itself to heterosexual relationships involving Thais and Europeans. Second, it shifts the scholarly gaze from marriage and family issues to Thai migrants' mobilities in spatial, social, and intergenerational terms. And third, it highlights Thai migrants' engagement in the labor market as intimate workers and entrepreneurs to uncover the factors shaping their (re)productive labor and social incorporation in their receiving countries. Using an intersectional approach, this special issue presents six empirically grounded case studies to unveil often-neglected dimensions and complexities of Europe-Thailand transnational migration.
This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 interviews with Thai... more This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 interviews with Thai migrants in Brighton, East Sussex. It explores how Thai immigrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and migration pathways mobilize ethnic and non-ethnic forms of capital in their entrepreneurial activities. Thai immigrants constitute a relatively new, small, but internally diverse migrant population in the UK, with female marriage migrants dominating the Thai migrant population in the past two decades. The findings of this study reveal that Thai migrants tend to own small-scale businesses or provide personal services in three sectors: cleaning and care work, beauty and massage, and food and catering. In their interaction with opportunity structures in the UK, Thai restaurant and massage entrepreneurs mobilize the exotic notion of "Thai-ness" to add value to their services catering to local British customers.
The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Migration
Retirement Migration to the Global South
This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist ... more This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist beach city on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand, using lifestyle migration as a theoretical framework. The data are based on six months of ethnographic study of German communities and in-depth interviews with twelve German migrants in Pattaya. We argue that German migration to Pattaya can be conceptualized as lifestyle migration since it is a move of individuals from a more developed country to a less developed one in search of a better life. Consistent with the narrative of lifestyle migration, German migrants in Pattaya cite negative circumstances before migration and a better life after migration as their motivation. In addition, findings reveal that relationships with Thai women play an important role in the migration of German migrants, who are predominantly older males, to Pattaya. This indicates that in the case of German migration to Pattaya, lifestyle migration is gendered and closely linked to marriage migration.
Globalization literature underscores the flows of people, information, technologies, capital and ... more Globalization literature underscores the flows of people, information, technologies, capital and ideas across national borders (Appadurai 1996). The contact between cultures following these transnational flows has resulted in the widespread exchange and transformation of cultural forms (Appadurai 1996, Featherstone 1995).
Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third World Studies, 2007
The proliferation of introduction-for-marriage websites has contributed to the growth of cross-bo... more The proliferation of introduction-for-marriage websites has contributed to the growth of cross-border marriages and the so-called mail-order bride phenomenon that shape gendered migration patterns. Drawing from content and discourse analyses of six websites featuring prospective brides from the Philippines and Thailand, this paper explores how the distinctive characteristics of Thai and Filipino women’s representation on intermarriage websites are shaped by Thailand’s and the Philippines’ history and economy. It explains how and why the representation of Thai and Filipino women on intermarriage websites involves power and violence, both symbolic power at the representational level and physical violence in the material world, thus creating unequal Third World-First World power relations that are embedded in international migration circuits. Drawing from postcolonial cultural studies and feminist media theories, it delineates the representational, symbolic, and material forms of power...
Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia
Filipino teachers have become the largest group of foreign teachers in Thailand as English langua... more Filipino teachers have become the largest group of foreign teachers in Thailand as English language education gains increasing importance in the kingdom. Their migratory experience, however, demonstrates that schools favour white native English speakers (NES) over them. Differential treatments of Filipino and white NES teachers in Thai schools are manifested overtly in the form of a pay gap and in more subtle micropolitics of bodily management. By examining a postcolonial view and the notion of English language teaching as aesthetic labour, Filipino teachers are found to face racialized and gendered discrimination in English language education in Thailand.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
This article explains why significant Thai-Western 'both-ways' migration pathways have evolved, g... more This article explains why significant Thai-Western 'both-ways' migration pathways have evolved, grown and sustained over the last decades. It introduces a set of research contributions on transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and 'the West'countries from Europe, North America and Australia. While Thai and Western people's social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, we consider it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Specifically, we argue that the growing 'bothways' Thai-Western migration pathways can only be understood by reference to three features of globalisation processes specific to Thailand: first, cross-border connections and social networks generated by massive West-to-Thailand tourist mobilities that incentivise Western men to see living permanently with a Thai partner as 'realistic'; second, the radical transformations of Thai rural societies under conditions of economic development that produces 'surplus' mobile women; and third, the restrictive state immigration and citizenship regimes in the West and Thailand that leaves few pathways open for migration, other than by 'marriage'. In sum, Thailand's specific experience of globalisation is the explanatory backstory to the extraordinary prevalence of Thai-Western 'both-ways' migrations.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
ABSTRACT This paper examines the global trade of Thai tourism and related service industries such... more ABSTRACT This paper examines the global trade of Thai tourism and related service industries such as restaurant, spa and hospital – service activities in which the body and bodily emotions of both service consumers and providers are central. I will demonstrate how the Thai state and private sector market Thai services to the world and construct Thailand as a destination for bodily and spiritual fulfilment. Analysing Thailand as an exporter of care and body labour, this article highlights the important role the nation-state and local socioeconomic structures play in shaping global care chains. State policy that promotes tourism and related service industries as a key economic development strategy has shaped current interrelated forms of transnational mobilities between Thailand and more affluent countries – marriage migration, health and medical tourism, and retirement migration. I also explore the interface between Thai state policies on the export of care and lived experiences of Thailand-Europe transnational migrants. Through their occupation choices, marital relocation decisions and care arrangements, Thai migrants in Europe and European migrants in Thailand both resist and reproduce the commodification of care and body work.
Kasarinlan: Philippine Journal of Third …, 2007
Tourism Analysis
The craft beer movement and craft beer tourism are a new global phenomenon that has reached vario... more The craft beer movement and craft beer tourism are a new global phenomenon that has reached various parts of the world. However, the literature on craft beer tourism mostly focuses on traditional origins of craft beer in Western countries—the US, Australia, and European countries. This research note illustrates how a study of the Thai craft beer movement and craft beer tourism could contribute to the existing body of knowledge. The consumption of non-Western people in non-Western places has been underrepresented in the literature of food and beverage tourism. The craft beer movement has spread to Thailand via urban middle-class Thais who brought the passion for and knowledge of home brewing from the West to Thailand. Brewing lessons, brewery visits, and craft beer events/ festivals have functioned as community building activities for Thai craft beer enthusiasts as well as the main craft beer distribution channel. Craft beer consumption continues to grow despite the Thai alcoholic pr...
This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist ... more This study explores the emerging phenomenon of German migration to Pattaya, a well-known tourist beach city on the east coast of the Gulf of Thailand, using lifestyle migration as a theoretical framework. The data are based on six months of ethnographic study of German communities and in-depth interviews with twelve German migrants in Pattaya. We argue that German migration to Pattaya can be conceptualized as lifestyle migration since it is a move of individuals from a more developed country to a less developed one in search of a better life. Consistent with the narrative of lifestyle migration, German migrants in Pattaya cite negative circumstances before migration and a better life after migration as their motivation. In addition, findings reveal that relationships with Thai women play an important role in the migration of German migrants, who are predominantly older males, to Pattaya. This indicates that in the case of German migration to Pattaya, lifestyle migration is gendered ...
Annals of Tourism Research, 2017
The purpose of this research is to investigate the gendered economy of ethnic minority souvenir v... more The purpose of this research is to investigate the gendered economy of ethnic minority souvenir vending in Thailand’s urban and coastal tourist areas. Increasing numbers of the Akha minority group have migrated towards tourist hotspots to engage in urban souvenir vending. Ethnographic research shows that according to the Akha gender division of labour, souvenir production and distribution are considered women’s work. Peddling on foot, female Akha souvenir vendors are at the bottom of the informal tourism economy. It is shown that urban ethnic tourism primarily reproduces gender asymmetry in the division of work and that contestations of gender roles prove to be difficult. Mobile street vending enables ethnic minority women to become breadwinners of households but simultaneously reinforces gender inequality.
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020
This article explains why significant Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have evolved, g... more This article explains why significant Thai-Western ‘both-ways’ migration pathways have evolved, grown and sustained over the last decades. It introduces a set of research contributions on transnational social relationships and cross-border connections between people that arise from the increasingly large-scale mobilities and migrations between Thailand and ‘the West’ – countries from Europe, North America and Australia. While Thai and Western people’s social relationships are usually studied as personal stories within a cross-border marriage migration perspective, we consider it necessary to see them as more than marriage migration. Specifically, we argue that the growing ‘both-ways’ Thai-Western migration pathways can only be understood by reference to three features of globalisation processes specific to Thailand: first, cross-border connections and social networks generated by massive West-to-Thailand tourist mobilities that incentivise Western men to see living permanently with ...