Claiming Space: Navigating Landscapes of Power and Citizenship in Thai Labor Activism

Abstract

In Bangkok, Thailand, when female rural-to-urban migrants take up labor activism they not only challenge specific experiences of exploitation; they also lay claim to new forms of urban agency and citizenship. As labor activists, women navigate urban arenas of power that normally exclude migrants and lowwage workers as authoritative agents. As they do so, women both make pragmatic claims to workplace justice and equity and contest their exclusion from public places of value and idealized norms of citizenship. Moments of overt political confrontation (such as mass marches, strikes, and public demonstrations) are particularly dramatic and visible ways in which women workers contest their social and political marginality, demanding (and, at least temporarily, receiving) recognition from employers and other authorities. Similarly, educational seminars, workshops, and related activities bring activists into productive contact not only with progressive segments of the urban middle-classes (university students, academics, NGOs) but also with spaces of elite knowledge production and status display. In the process, Thai women's labor activism enacts critical spatial claims, refiguring an exclusionary urban and national landscape into one where workers (both as migrants and as women)

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