Richard Adams Update

Richard Adams, former staff member (1994-2000) in the Asia Regional Programs office and the Human Rights and International Cooperation unit in New York has been awarded a research fellowship by the Columbia University Anthropology Department for work in Bangkok, Thailand. He will engage in field work study of the everyday life of migrant laborers who have left rural Thailand for the city. By looking at the practices of every day life of a particular group of workers at one construction site, he will be probing the disparities between various popular representations of the "countryside" and how it might contrast with how migrants see themselves, and whether "nostalgia" is actually an important consideration in the discourses on migrant labor in Thailand. This is all framed within a key moment in the history of Thailand when tensions between the "rural" and "urban" threaten to upset the very stability of the nation.