Doctoral student Anusorn Unno (University of Washington), under the guidance of Dr. Celia Lowe, will undertake research on changing relationships between citizens and governments by investigating how local citizens deal with competing forms of sovereignty in a multi-ethnic situation of civil unrest. The research will be carried out in a Malay Muslim village in the southernmost region of Thailand. A predominantly Malay Muslim area within the Thai Buddhist state, the region has witnessed multiple rounds of insurgency. The current insurgency, which dates from 2004, has brought ordinary Malay Muslims to the forefront. They not only account for the majority of casualties, but they also have been drawn into new questions of identity and allegiance. This situation provides an excellent site for investigating how citizens, in this case from a minority population, negotiate identity and allegiance in relation to the nation.
The researcher will focus on how Malay Muslims experience and explain the current insurgency; how questions of identity and allegiance are raised in the contexts of everyday life, state encounters, and civic engagements; and how Malay Muslims seek and enact agency by engaging with various forms of sovereignty. The researcher will collect data with a variety of social science methods, including: participant observation of daily life and livelihood under conditions of unrest; semi-structured and informal interviews; content analyses of school curriculum and interviews with school representatives; travel with and observation of the routines of government representatives; and content analyses of religious media and interviews with religious representatives.
The research is important because the situation experienced by the Malay Muslims parallels that experienced by many minorities under conditions of changing notions of the role of government. Thus the research will contribute to social science theory. The research also will document the lives of an understudied Mulsim minority population in an area of the world of increasing political importance. Finally, this award contributes to the education of a social scientist.
