Reflections: methodological reflections and alternative narratives

By making visible questions of representation and voice in this way, I center my focus on the ways in which the research space of our collaborative project was itself an important site for the production, selection, and performance of knowledge, albeit in subtle ways. Unpacking terms like representation and voice helps gauge the circulation of power and the production of discourse vis-à-vis migrant worker lives.Even though, as noted above, some co-researchers live in or are from the same neighborhoods they analyzed in the study, the task of analysis and a variety of individual encounters with efforts to professionalize their work over the years engendered the deployment of certain discursive maneuvers that wedge space between these individuals and the subjects of the research. In the end, one might argue that there is no one individual empowered to speak on behalf of another subject. In fact, it is for this reason that the collaborative research endeavor relied primarily on individuals identifying as members of a broader migrant community. The assumption of voice is an assumption of representation, but at the same time overlooks the many divisions between research participants and those recruited to play the role of researcher. To the extent to which one’s position vis-à-vis research participants is an assumption, representation threatens to deny a subject her or his agency because such an act imposes one’s own subjectivity onto another’s.

Validity as authenticity, a phrase mentioned earlier in this chapter, implies that researchers recognize and respect participants’ and/or co-researchers’ agency and knowledge; it implies a level of trust that participants invest in the research process, a sentiment that is reinforced only by researchers’ efforts to ground their analysis in the knowledge system or framework of participants, to actively co-construct knowledge. Ensuring and maintaining “just enough trust” (Lykes and Moane 2009) in the research context countervails the forces of power that might push for the privileging of alternative, administrative, market-centered, knowledge systems over the local. This dissertation’s methods are premised on multiple levels of trust: among co-researchers, between co- researchers and me, and between migrant worker participants and our team as we conducted interviews and focus group discussions with them. Given the topic of the assessment, the study was premised on an assumption that migrant worker participants and co-researchers’ relationships were founded on a strong bond of trust that would enable candid discussion about social problems in their community, albeit not in their households.

This was perhaps a simplistic and problematic presumption rooted, despite my best efforts, in a homogenizing perception of the border. First, there were certain levels of difference that we did not take into consideration during the design phase of this project. Co-researchers and I maintain different notions of culture and its relationship to violence and gendered social relations. Additionally, the tying of religion to culture and behavior in our discussions and analysis suggests that we did not build sufficient trust or did not navigate well the lines of social difference between our group and Muslim participants, who are a majority in the Kyuwe Kyan neighborhood. These participants appear as more

essentialized than other participants with patterns of violence linked inextricably to cultural beliefs. This constitutes an important gap and limit in this dissertation’s approach that could have been better addressed through constructive dialogue in our team to

confront questions of difference, power, and representation as they relate to certain subsets of our sample.

Second, the insider-outsider dynamic of our group and the powerful structures of support and funding for our project meant that the discourse of our collective discussions trended toward a system of knowledge rooted in organizational frames for planning and analysis, at times more so than the local knowledge of the communities where we conducted research. Thus on one level, I attempt to maintain a constructivist

epistemology as I approach my analysis of the collaborative research project, but on another level, our collective analysis of violence against women and strategies to respond to or diminish such violence adhered to more of a post-positivist framework that sought to discover certain “truths” about the migrant worker population. As I have shown in this chapter, such a tendency is incredibly significant for what it reflects. It reveals the power of certain logics on the border, a type of relational force that imposes discursive and practical order on the lives of migrant workers. If pursued further, it might also provide some clarity to evaluative questions looking at the effectiveness of development work and how there might be a kind of insularity, or circular feedback loop, to strategizing about programming and interventions.

Reflecting back on the critiques outlined here for the epistemologies and methods relied on in this dissertation and the ways in which they can relate to the construction of and perpetuation of knowledges that have an ordering effect on certain populations, there

are certain questions that should be asked. These are both reflexive and they can serve as starting points for ethical and methodological considerations of other collaborative action research projects in contexts of displacement. I take as a guide the writing of Fine and colleagues (2000) who call for researchers to give attention to the ways their analyses relate to participants’ voices, wishes, interpretations, agendas, and welfare.

1) How do we own all the knowledges we construct and circulate?

This first question relates to all contexts in which a PAR methodology guides research methods. I could not reconcile in this project what to do with analyses that essentialize or unfairly homogenize or divide up groups of people. Beyond addressing such issues in dialogue, how should such concepts and discourses fit within the final analysis and interpretation of data? As is clear in this dissertation, I have chosen to interrogate such moments, but I know that these findings are likely not to be welcome to co-researchers and the advisory group who did not commit time and effort in order to be critiqued. Perhaps in this sense, I am writing against the interests of the people with whom I collaborated. To ensure that all the findings that make it into this dissertation are those I can share with the research team, perhaps I do not need to cut out the critiques that I include here, but rather find a way to pose thought-provoking questions to the team that puts together in discussion the needs of migrants and the impact our organizational

knowledge frameworks and institutional assumptions about those migrants can have. This relates to how I share my findings with participants, co-researchers, and advisory group members. Building off of Avishai et al. (2013), findings that run contrary to participating organizations’ assumptions are cause for reflexivity about one’s institutional

sometimes contradictory notions of women’s empowerment that influenced the implementation of this study.

2) Is a PAR methodology suited to “humanitarian goals”?

Subsequent work should pose this question at the outset of a project. I don’t think there is one right answer. As noted above, the co-construction of knowledge in the service of transformative social and political change are central tenets of a PAR epistemology. When the goal the project’s architects articulate is more closely related to biowelfare, it may become difficult to keep in focus the aims of a deeper shift (see for example, Lindorfer 2009). The immediate needs associated with a response to violence, such as shelters, referral networks, and a variety of other solutions, can sometimes dominate over questions about inequalities (gender, ethnic, and social) and discrimination that are systemic and institutionalized. And this is best since questions about biowelfare arise because of the urgency of the situation. As one advisory group member put it, “they are struggling for their lives so they cannot give time” (IFGD, ES). It was my own goal and the goal of some co-researchers and advisory group members to try to keep the

immediate concerns for safety and the broader structural forces linked in our discussions and in the formulation of tangible actions and strategies. This proved difficult in practice both because of donor pressure and because of the differing goals of other members of the team.

3) What does transformation mean in contexts of displacement?

There are two interrelated components to this question. First, this research was conducted in a space that was highly liminal. Participants’ time in Thailand varied from only a few months to a couple decades; participants’ time in specific settlements also varied,

especially in Phob Phra as migrants reported moving regularly between different farms and plantation in the area. With so many people transitioning in and out, is there time in this context for collaboration on longer-term goals? But the transience of the space also raises questions about what is to be transformed. Do we focus on transformation of oppressive migration trajectories, helping to foster stronger networks, addressing the root causes that place migrants in the situation of having to rely on predatory brokers? On xenophobia and racial as well as ethnic discrimination? Or on the abuse of power by local officials? It was hard to find agreement among this project’s participants and in the end we settled on pragmatism, that is, immediate, lower-cost, concrete, and shorter-term goals. Second, in such contexts, how do we measure representation and voice? That is, are there communities to represent? Such spaces are not only marked by a fragmentation of sovereignties with local authorities and NGOs stepping in to perform the work of order and welfare. They are marked by social fragmentation as well; settlements consist of individuals and families who have been uprooted at different times from different places and who have come together to work. When thinking about representation and voice, then, we need to ask not only what lines of difference and inequality divide communities, but also whether we are doing harm by imposing a sense of community onto people.

Such research projects can always strive to be more vigilant about these issues. Even though it is common for collaborative methods working from a PAR epistemology to involve multiple layers of participants, some of which are more involved than others in the co-construction of knowledge, maybe in this context of urgency and transience, participatory action would be more transformative and more grounded in the lived

realities of migrants if there was no boundary between participants and co-researchers. That is, if all participants were co-researchers and we maintained a smaller sample size.

In addition to questions about methods and epistemology, this chapter provides one angle for thinking about knowledge construction and the articulation and

interpellation of particular ideas and concepts that have an impact on the lives of migrants who are on the receiving end of NGO projects. This can be considered a form of ordering that influences migrant lives. In the next chapters, I will look more at the influence of other ordering mechanisms linked to precarity and structural violence, moving from the more discursive to an analysis of people, relations, and places in terms of power and the development of social organization.

Chapter4—A Proliferation of virtual boundaries: Violence and precarity in the production of migrant spaces

“The crackdown started on Thursday in the wake of the Thai coup. Some 1,000 Myanmar workers in Tak’s nine districts, including Mae Sot, were under detention. Myanmar migrants living in major cities like Bangkok and Chiang Mai have been keeping low profile for fear of being rounded up by the authorities. ‘Some have been in hiding near forests and farms. In cities, they stay in locked apartments without making noise,’ said Moe Gyo, chairperson of the Joint Action Committee for Burma Affairs.”

—Eleven Myanmar, 14 June 2014 1. Introduction

In mid-June 2014, the Thai army and local authorities deported several thousand Burmese and Cambodian migrant workers from both central and border provinces, triggering a mass exodus of almost 250,000 people in the following days (Bangkok Post 2014; Finch 2014). This took place in the second month of Thailand’s National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) government, led by the military after a May 22 coup d’état.1

The raids followed the NCPO’s directive to create a new military-led committee to develop new policies on “foreign labor,” a top priority after enforcing an end to the political turmoil that had rocked the country for so many months prior to the coup. This crackdown clearly targeted undocumented migrants in an effort to “clean up society,” and defend the nation’s security, with references to illegal weapons, drugs, and migrants (Asian Correspondent, June 17, 2014). Factory owners employing hundreds of

1

The May 22, 2014 coup d’état in Thailand was the culmination of months of political tension between the Pheu Thai party that held power in the government at that time; their allies, the United Front for

Democracy against Dictatorship (UDD); and the People’s Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC). But beyond this specific event, the coup was only the most recent iteration of more than a decade of unrest and political conflict between multiple factions that divided along social class, center-periphery, pro/anti monarchy, and geographic lines. Additional incidents in the last decade include a coup in 2006, which ousted then-prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the government’s suppression of mass protests in 2010 with military force, resulting in more than 90 deaths. For a detailed account of Thailand’s political conflict over the last 20 years, see the special issue of Current Anthropology online, “The Wheel of Crisis in Thailand,” (2014) edited by Ben Tausig, Claudio Sopranzetti, Felicity Aulino, and Eli Elinoff. [Accessed

undocumented migrants closed their doors out of fear that they would be punished. Landlords renting out space for migrant housing, including individual homes and entire labor camps announced they would no longer make their land available for those without legal status (The Nation, June 12, 2014).

While these events may have signaled the new military government’s earnest commitment to solve two decades of contradictory migrant labor policies and revolving door enforcement, the excerpt above reminds us that “cleansing” is never clean. Raids detain individuals, remove them from their homes, separate them from their families, and tear apart social networks that have developed over years of people living and working together (Mendoza and Olivos 2009). Much scholarship has devoted attention to the machinery of deportation, its relevance to states’ articulation of sovereignty, and the ways it affects the lives of migrants (De Genova 2010; Coutin 2007; Brabeck et al. 2011; De Genova and Peutz 2010).

In the case of Thailand, the government’s goal, according to weekly nation-wide addresses made by the country’s military leader, General Prayuth Chan-Ocha, is not to rid the country of migrant labor, a point he has vigorously stressed as factories emptied and hundreds of thousands left in an effort to get out of the country on their own terms. Rather it is to “restrict people from coming into the inner parts of the country;”

effectively to enforce what has been the practice for many years of concentrating migrant work in special economic zones along borders (Asian Correspondent, June 17, 2014). Indeed, for decades Thailand has worked to create a “dual economy” with labor-intensive industries drawing on migrant populations clustered in zones where employers pay as low as 1/4 the national minimum wage (Arnold and Pickles 2011). As noted in earlier

chapters, this kind of graduated sovereignty (Ong 2000) is a product of the border’s relationship with the state and global supply chains; a messy history of conflicting interests, displacement, primitive accumulation, and the movement of capital. But as the excerpt at the start of this chapter shows, the work of zoning migrants into border spaces can be just as violent as deportations. In fact, the latter is often a tool in the service of the former. Such moments stand out, but they are not exceptional. Rather they are individual events in the commonplace violence inscribed upon migrant bodies. In the time since the coup, the military government has coupled roundups of undocumented migrants with directives to enable smoother migrant registration and the creation of new day-passes for seasonal agricultural workers in border areas, though in practice little has changed, as the government repeats the familiar pattern of deadlines for registration backed by the threat of deportation (Bangkok Post 2014; Penchan 2014; Nyan Lynn Aung).

In my dissertation, I interrogate the productive violence of this zoning work. Coming from a phenomenological perspective to ask how migrants survive and negotiate such conditions, it is crucial to consider migrant subjectivities, technologies of

governance, and violent spaces as mutually constitutive. That means looking at how the everyday acts of violence involved in enforcing Thailand’s migration policies play a key role in Burmese migrants’ development of tactics to get by. When I write “everyday acts of violence” here, I mean both harmful physical behavior and a more invisible set of forces that renders migrants’ hardship and suffering seemingly inevitable and justified. As McGuffey writes, “‘when things fall apart’ we learn a lot about structure and agency by observing the ways social actors attempt to put things back together again” (2008: 216). To consider how all this violence effects certain survival strategies among migrants,