PhD defence: Agrarian Change and Emotional Struggles over Land, Labor and Mobility

Across the world, policy and modernization discourses portray rural youth as having lost interest in rural and agrarian life and as irresistibly drawn to modern lifestyles in urban centers. In this thesis, I explore this phenomenon through the case of rural youth out-migration from Myanmar to Thailand’s agriculture and tourism sectors, which receive very little attention compared to for example factory and fishery workers.

In particular, I focus on how young people experience rural-rural migration. I situate my theoretical reflections within ongoing debates around the agrarian question, which explores the developments and impacts of the expanding modes of capitalist production in rural areas, and peasant responses to such developments. However, the agrarian question includes a question of labor given that many peasants are pushed off the land they used to cultivate and therefore forced into new insecure labor regimes. Hence, scholars increasingly turn their attention to how peasants reproduce themselves in these regimes. In combination with such perspectives, I further focus on emotions and subjectivity formation and draw on ethnographic, feminist, and participatory methods with young women and men.

Empirically, the thesis shows how young migrants are stuck in intense struggles intimately linked to labor, land and mobility. These struggles are shaped by the migrants intersect subject positions including class, gender, citizenship and race. In relation to labor, I document that illegalized migrants in Thailand’s agro-industry live in squalid camps and work for exploitative salaries. Gender plays an important role in shaping precarity, and women for instance receive lower salaries whilst being responsible for making ends meet. I argue that precarity in the Thai agro-industry is not only a result of the social relations of production, but also the practices of illegalization deployed daily through a combination of official and unofficial regulations by the state authorities, the local police, and the farmers who employ them. Illegalization, therefore, is crucial to take into consideration to promote fairer agrarian labor conditions and enhance the constrained agency in the agro-industry.

In relation to land and mobility, I show that rural youth take up work in other locations due to material and emotional struggles to acquire land back in their villages. Many of the young migrants would have preferred not to leave in the first place but saw migration to Thailand as the only option to establish an independent livelihood and transition to adulthood. I therefore argue that while young migrants face labor struggles over their work conditions in Thailand, access to land in Myanmar remains an important issue. Indeed, not all rural youth have lost interest in rural life where they dream of both agrarian and non-agrarian futures. The military coup in Myanmar on the one hand, and the exploitative conditions in Thailand on the other, however, mean that the relatively simple dream of setting up petty commodity production in their villages, for many, is difficult, if even possible, to realize. Thus, their time in Thailand away from friends and family extends to decades, with significant negative impacts on youth well-being.

Methodologically I contribute to the study of everyday experiences by exploring the use of photovoice as an ethnographic method. I argue that the photovoice method is especially useful, as it enables the young migrants to share their experiences of exploitation through their own aesthetic and poetic expressions, providing new insights into how they make sense of and construct messages about their challenging conditions in both Myanmar and as (legal and illegal) migrants in Thailand. In doing so, the method helps challenge victimizing portrayals and shows that whilst it is nearly impossible for the young migrants to directly resist, they employ other forms of strategies to endure their precarious life conditions.

Theoretically, I draw together the materialist perspective from agrarian studies with power, subjectivities and emotions. In doing so, I argue that one is not more significant than the other and that materiality, emotions, and subjectivities are co-constitutive. From that, follows an alternative lens to studying agrarian change, which understands the material aspects of agrarian change as both shaping and shaped by people’s emotional experiences of subjectivation and self-subjectivation. Indeed, while the changing modes and relations of production that accompany agrarian change affect emotional and subjective experiences depending on gender, generation, race, and documentation status, the latter also affect agrarian change and shape how young people navigate these changes.

Overall, the thesis contributes to a nuanced perspective on young people’s emotional and subjective experiences of precarity and illegalization under neoliberal agrarian relations of production and migration regimes, and in doing so, further enhances our understanding of the unanticipated developments within contemporary agrarian societies.