Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: Negotiating Lives in Islamic Southern Thailand: Competing Sovereignties, Contested Identities, and Mediated Agency in a Disputed Land

博士生Anusorn Unno（华盛顿大学）将在Celia Lowe博士的指导下，通过调查当地公民如何在内乱的多民族情况下处理相互竞争的主权形式，对公民与政府之间不断变化的关系进行研究。这项研究将在泰国最南部地区的一个马来穆斯林村庄进行。该地区是泰国佛教国家内以马来穆斯林为主的地区，经历了多轮叛乱。当前的叛乱始于2004年，将普通的马来穆斯林带到了最前沿。他们不仅在伤亡中占大多数，而且还被卷入了身份和忠诚的新问题。这种情况提供了一个很好的网站，可以调查公民（在这种情况下是少数民族人口）如何协商与国家有关的身份和忠诚。研究人员将专注于马来穆斯林如何经历和解释当前的叛乱；身份和忠诚的问题是如何在日常生活、国家接触和公民参与的背景下提出的；以及马来穆斯林如何通过参与各种形式的主权来寻求和制定代理机构。研究者将采用多种社会科学方法收集数据，包括：参与观察动荡条件下的日常生活和生计；半结构化和非正式面试；学校课程内容分析与学校代表访谈陪同和观察政府代表的日常工作；以及宗教媒体的内容分析和对宗教代表的采访。这项研究很重要，因为马来穆斯林所经历的情况与许多少数民族在政府角色观念变化的情况下所经历的情况相似。因此，该研究将有助于社会科学理论的发展。这项研究还将记录一个未被充分研究的穆斯林少数民族在世界上日益重要的政治地区的生活。最后，这个奖项有助于社会科学家的教育。

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.