Browsing by Author "Sirijit Sunanta"
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Publication Metadata only Applications of experience economy in craft beer tourism: A case study in Thailand’s context(2021-09-01) Rangson Chirakranont; Sirijit Sunanta; Mahidol UniversityWith Thailand as a context, this study explores the applications of Pine and Gilmore’s experience economy framework in two forms of craft beer tourism, namely brewpubs and festivals. A three-pronged qualitative research design is used wherein data was collected through observa-tions, interviews (n = 26), and netnography (n = 203). The findings revealed that both forms of craft beer tourism implement four dimensions of the experience economy in different measures. Esthetic and escapist dimensions benefit from natural, scenic settings and a man-made environment. In ad-dition, they advance the framework by proposing the dimension of entrepreneurship, which or-chestrates the entertainment and education elements that enhance tourists’ experiences. The application of the experience economy framework is a useful strategic approach for craft beer tourism which can be applied in niche or special interest tourism, while also providing a significant influence on destination marketing and sustainable development.Publication Metadata only Craft Beer Tourism in Thailand(2021) Rangson Chirakranont; Sirijit Sunanta; Mahidol University. Mahidol University International CollegeThe 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 production law that prohibits home brewing. For future studies, different craft beer tourism activities in Thailand should be analyzed for 1) the adoption of the experience economy framework, 2) the formation of the consumption community, 3) the roles of various stakeholders who differentially contribute to and benefit from craft beer tourism activities, and 4) the role of foreign tourists in the development of craft beer tourism in Thailand.Publication Metadata only From rural life to transnational wife: Agrarian transition, gender mobility, and intimate globalization in transnational marriages in northeast Thailand(2013-12-16) Sirijit Sunanta; Leonora C. Angeles; Mahidol University; The University of British ColumbiaPopular and academic discourses of globalization are often gender biased, focusing on formal and impersonal realms of the market, politics, and technologies. This article explores an intimate dimension of globalization by analyzing the transnational marriage trend among women in northeast Thailand (Isan's) villages. The phua farang (foreign husband) phenomenon in Isan epitomizes the intimate link between the global political economy and individuals' desires, aspirations, and imagination in the private realm of personal and marital relationships. The phua farang phenomenon is embedded in a context of spatial and economic inequalities at the local, national, and global levels, and manifests classed and gendered strategies by which marginalized subjects attempt to transcend the limited opportunities for upward social mobility available to these women. © 2013 Taylor & Francis.Publication Metadata only Gendered practices in urban ethnic tourism in Thailand(2017-05-01) Alexander Trupp; Sirijit Sunanta; University of the South Pacific; Mahidol University© 2017 Elsevier Ltd 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.Item Metadata only German migrants in Pattaya, Thailand : lifestyle, motivations, and integration(Mahidol University. Mahidol University Library and Knowledge Center, 2017) Kwanchanok Jaisuekun; Sirijit Sunanta; Narong ArdsmitiThis study examined the German migration to Pattaya, Thailand, focusing on migrants' motivations, lifestyle, social networks and integration. The empirical data of this study were based on six months of ethnographic research in Pattaya and 12 in-depth interviews with German migrants, particularly in the settings of two German social organizations: the German Language Pattaya Expats Club and the Meeting Center Pattaya. The researcher discussed the relocation of German nationals to Pattaya using lifestyle migration, a relatively new concept in migration studies, as a key theoretical framework. The concept of lifestyle migration is useful to understand the German migration to Pattaya given that most migrants were motivated in searching for a better way of life.Furthermore,this study found that Thai women played an important role in the German migration to Pattaya.Romantic/sexual and marital relationships with Thai women were involved in almost every aspect of migrants' lives, especially migration motivation and the enhanced lifestyle migrants enjoyed. Hence, in the case of German migration to Pattaya, the researcher argued that lifestyle migration and marriage migration were closely linked. Pattaya, a well-known established international tourist destination, played a vital role in shaping migrants' lifestyle and relationships with local inhabitants. In the international setting of Pattaya, German migrants live as if they were in Germany, surrounded by well-developed infrastructure, good quality medical facilities and German communities. Choosing Pattaya as a residential destination implies migrant's desire to extend their privilegestatus as tourist for their long term stay as well as to lead a life of their choice at a distance from their Thai in-laws. Findings also revealed that the interactions between German migrants and Thais were mainly those between patrons and clients rather than friends and neighbors. In the lack of formal recognition and assistance from German and Thai governmental bodies, German speaking social circles provided support and assistance for the German migrants in Pattaya.Publication Metadata only Globalising Thailand through gendered ‘both-ways’ migration pathways with ‘the West’: cross-border connections between people, states, and places(2020-01-01) Paul Statham; Sarah Scuzzarello; Sirijit Sunanta; Alexander Trupp; University of the South Pacific; University of Sussex; Mahidol University© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 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 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.Publication Metadata only Globalising the Thai ‘high-touch’ industry: exports of care and body work and gendered mobilities to and from Thailand(2020-01-01) Sirijit Sunanta; Mahidol University© 2020, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. 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.Publication Open Access Intersections of tourism, migration, and exile(2023) Sirijit SunantaItem Metadata only Race, gender and politics of English language education in Thailand : The Filipino educators in the Kingdom(Mahidol University. Mahidol University Library and Knowledge Center, 2024) Amurao, Analiza Liezl P., 1971-; Sirijit Sunanta; Horstmann, Alexander; Doneys, PhilippeThis study explores the politics of race and gender in the English education in Thai schools through the experience of Filipino teachers employed in Thai educational institutions. The data were drawn from a two-year ethnographic study in Thai primary and secondary schools both in the Bangkok Metropolitan area and other nearby provinces, during which the researcher conducted in-depth interviews with Filipino teachers and Thai school administrators and organized focus group discussions with Filipino teachers. Selected documents from the Philippine and Thai governments were also analyzed. The researcher employed a critical race and gender analysis to explain workplace discrimination faced by Filipino teachers and adopted postcolonial lenses to analyze Thai discourses on the West and the English language that create such discrimination. A number of major findings are revealed by the study. Firstly, findings demonstrate that the Filipino teachers' employment in Thailand is oftentimes facilitated by their extensive network through family and friends. Secondly, the study also shows that Filipino teachers engage in transnational activities involving their host- and sending-countries by way of making productive investments, helping them make further sense of their earnings, savings and remittances. Thirdly, findings reveal as well the role religion plays in many of the Filipino teachers' migratory experience. More importantly, findings demonstrate that not only is a Filipino teacher's religious membership used for spiritual nourishment, but it also serves as a channel through which one can gain employment via a church network and relevant support system hence the teachers' resorting to instrumental religion. Lastly, this study reveals that Filipino teachers experience overt discrimination in the workplace where their race and the variant of English language they produce place them as second-class foreign teachers compared to white native English speakers from Western countries. Predominantly, Filipino teachers are expected to embody warm and caring personalities and present well-kept and beautiful bodies while their male native English speaker counterparts are exempted from the feminization of the teaching profession.Item Open Access The impacts of western long-stayers on local health and elder care landscape : a case study of Pattaya city, Thailand(Mahidol University, 2023) Kwanchanok Jaisuekun; Sirijit Sunanta; Scuzzarello, Sarah; Sureeporn PunpuingDrawing on feminist insights on the political economy of care, this study examines the implications of International Retirement Migration (IRM) on a local community and its care landscape. The empirical data of this study were drawn from 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the resort city of Pattaya and 41 in-depth interviews with local Thai stakeholders, including eight representatives from the public sector, 13 from the private sector and NGOs, and 20 local Thais living in Pattaya City. This study revealed that participants had different perceptions of and experiences with Western retirees in the City. The majority of public sector representatives, healthcare-related business owners and local residents conveyed positive perceptions towards older Western long-stayers who they considered as contributors to the local economy and who posed no significant threat to the availability of healthcare services to locals. On the other hand, public healthcare workers and NGO representatives were concerned about Western migrants who were in poor health and uninsured or financially insecure. This group of Western long-stayers relied on public healthcare services that are primarily intended for Thai citizens, and this further strains public care resources. Western migrants who can afford privatized healthcare contribute to an increased sense of inequality in terms of access to and quality of healthcare; those with money can afford private healthcare whereas the rest rely on more limited public services. Nevertheless, local Thai people often normalize this stratification. As a part of transnational ageing, IRM challenges the logic of national welfare fixed within state territoriality. Western migrants are often unable to avail themselves of the social security services in either their home country or the country in which they choose to retire. Lacking formal state support, Western migrants in Thailand are forced to be self-reliant for their health and personal care needs, and those with limited funds tend to rely on the help of family, friends and partners. Consequently, Thai partners/spouses have become the main source of care for frail older Western migrants. This study argues that the case of older Western migrants in Thailand manifests a shift in international migration trends. Western retirees have become an important part of the global care chain and international division of reproductive labour in which less economically advanced countries provide care for people from wealthier countries. This highlights social inequality in the context of global ageing.Item Open Access The Thai craft beer movement : tourism and consumption community(Mahidol University, 2022) Rangson Chirakranont; Sirijit Sunanta; Chen, Ka Tat Nixon; Trupp, AlexanderThis research studied the phenomenon of Thai craft beer from three perspectives. First, it examined the main features of the Thai craft beer movement. Second, it investigated the salient social capital elements that are constructed in the Thai craft beer consumption community. Third, it explored Thai craft beer tourism and experience elements that attributed to the Thai craft beer movement. This study aimed to contribute to the understanding of craft beer tourism, a subcategory of food and beverage tourism, by providing a non-Western perspective. The inclusion of several additional factors found within the Thai context, and which has never been included in the craft beer tourism literature, provided a call for a more local outlook of the phenomenon as well as a different dimension to understanding craft beer tourism across diverse aspects. This study also provided important recommendations for nascent entrepreneurs. This study was drawn from qualitative research methods in collecting, analyzing, and interpreting the research data. The data were collected from four sources: 1) in-depth interviews with the craft brewers and consumers; 2) onsite observation; 3) secondary data sources related to the craft beer sector; 4) Netnography to gather data from online social media platforms namely Facebook and Instagram, and online user-generated content namely Google Review and TripAdvisor. Data analysis was performed in two approaches depending on the topic. To identify the social capital, a thematic coding was analyzed through the interview transcripts, observation notes, and Facebook content. To explore the experience elements in Thai craft beer tourism, a comparative case study of Thailand Beer Festival and Chit Beer, a local microbrewery, was analyzed using the data from interviews, participatory observations, online social media platforms, and online user-generated content. The findings revealed that the alcohol laws have a direct impact on the Thai craft beer sector. The laws have controlled and set requirements in different aspects namely production, distribution, and consumption. Many brewers avoided the production limitation by using contract breweries in foreign countries. For the marketing and distribution channel, pubs and bars, beer events, and local distributors are the main drivers in distributing the products. For the social capital aspect, four social capital elements were associated with building a strong community: community leader, community network, collaboration among members, and collective goals. The findings from the comparative analysis revealed that both cases practiced experience economy in their business in different measures. This study proposed an additional realm in the experience economy framework. The owners of craft beer businesses could contribute to the tourist experience by providing service, initiating interaction, and delivering information.Publication Metadata only They are ‘asians just like us’: Filipino teachers, colonial aesthetics and english language education in Thailand(2020-03-01) Analiza Liezl Perez-Amurao; Sirijit Sunanta; Mahidol University© 2020 ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. 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.Publication Open Access สถานะการโต้แย้งเรื่องพหุวัฒนธรรมในประเทศไทย(2556) ศิริจิต สุนันต๊ะ; Sirijit Sunanta; มหาวิทยาลัยมหิดล. สถาบันวิจัยภาษาและวัฒนธรรมเอเชีย. สาขาวิชาพหุวัฒนธรรมศึกษา; มหาวิทยาลัยมหิดล. สถาบันวิจัยภาษาและวัฒนธรรมเพื่อพัฒนาชนบทพหุวัฒนธรรมนิยมในฐานะจุดยืนทางศีลธรรมและการเมือง และในฐานะนโยบายของรัฐ พัฒนาขึ้นในบริบทของประเทศตะวันตกเป็นหลัก จากจุดเริ่มต้นในทศวรรษที่ 1970ในฐานะนโยบายอย่างเป็นทางการของรัฐในประเทศแคนาดาและออสเตรเลียและแนวทางของรัฐในการปฏิบัติต่อความหลากหลายทางเชื้อชาติและวัฒนธรรมในประเทศยุโรปบางประเทศและสหรัฐอเมริกา ที่ผ่านมามีข้อวิพากษ์ต่อพหุวัฒนธรรมนิยมอย่างกว้างขวาง รวมทั้งข้อวิพากษ์จากนักสตรีนิยม ในสองถึงสามทศวรรษที่ผ่านมา พหุวัฒนธรรมนิยมได้กลายเป็นวาทกรรมระดับโลก และได้รับการรับรองจากองค์กรระหว่างประเทศที่เรียกร้องให้รัฐต่างๆ ให้การสนับสนุนความหลากหลายทางเชื้อชาติและวัฒนธรรมภายในรัฐ เมื่อแนวคิดนี้กระจายไปในที่ต่างๆ ความหมายของพหุวัฒนธรรมนิยมเริ่มไม่ชัดเจนและขึ้นอยู่กับบริบทในบทความนี้ ผู้เขียนสำรวจสถานะข้อโต้แย้งเรื่องพหุวัฒนธรรมนิยมในประเทศไทย ในขณะที่แนวคิดเกี่ยวกับสิทธิทางวัฒนธรรมและสิทธิของคนกลุ่มน้อยในประเทศอยู่ในช่วงก่อตัวคำภาษาไทย “พหุวัฒนธรรม” ที่หมายถึงพหุวัฒนธรรมนิยม (multiculturalism) และความหลากหลายทางวัฒนธรรม (cultural diversity) ถูกใช้โดยนักวิชาการและภาคประชาสังคม ในการท้าทายวาทกรรมหลักเกี่ยวกับความเป็นหนึ่งเดียวทางวัฒนธรรม การครอบงำทางวัฒนธรรม ตลอดจนการรวมศูนย์อำนาจการบริหารของกรุงเทพฯ เมื่อไม่นานมานี้ หน่วยงานของรัฐและผู้มีส่วนในการกำหนดนโยบายเริ่มหันมาให้ความสำคัญกับการส่งเสริมความหลากหลาย ความสนใจใหม่ๆ ต่อความหลากหลายในประเทศไทยได้รับแรงบันดาลใจจากแนวคิดและการปฏิบัติสากลว่าด้วยสิทธิพลเมือง แต่ในขณะเดียวกันก็ปรากฏอิทธิพลของความสัมพันธ์ทางสังคมแบบลำดับชั้นซึ่งมีมาตั้งแต่ก่อนการเกิดขึ้นของรัฐสมัยใหม่