Cultural citizenship construction in Thailand – Lao PDR border school

Abstract

Ban Rim Khong School, located on the border between Thailand and Lao PDR in Chiang Khong District, Chiang Rai Province, is a cultural site consisting of students of different cultural and national backgrounds. It is also a site of ideological practices that allows actors in the border area to contest for the space to reproduce citizenship ideology in students. However, the school system tends to make the diversity of students and the politics of ideologies a matter of compromise and overlooks the aspect of contestation. Therefore, this study has the objectives to: (1) study and analyse citizenship construction by state and non-state actors in Ban Rim Khong School; and, (2) study and analyse the impact of the practices of citizenship construction by state and non-state actors on students of Ban Rim Khong School. This study adopted the method of phenomenological research and collected data from documents, observation, and interview. The research found that the contestation for, and practices of, citizenship construction by state and non-state organisations who were all local-level actors were conducted through three important ideological spaces in the school setting, namely: (1) school policy, through which actors drew on social capital and contested to use school administrators and teachers as a mechanism to penetrate through the school setting and drive the reproduction of their ideologies in the school policy; (2) official curriculum, which was used by actors as a mechanism to reproduce their ideologies through school curriculum and classroom management; and, (3) hidden curriculum, which encompasses knowledge that lies implicit in physical objects and daily interaction in school. The Chiang Khong District Office is a government agency that was able to contest and mostly reproduce neoliberalist ideology that covers diverse spaces. However, the majority of their practices lacked flexibility and did not develop close relationship with the target group. Compared to the District Office, the Rak Chiang Khong Conversation Group was a non-state organisation that managed to contest and quite predominantly reproduce localist ideology with a wider coverage, and higher flexibility in terms of its operation and relationship with students. However, other actors were found to lack the power to contest for every area in the school system, or the power was only limited to certain groups of students. The abovementioned contestations and practices helped to underscore the implication of the border school as a site of ideological practices with different actors contesting to use it as a mechanism to construct citizenship ideology that is in line with the context and requirements of the people in their respective areas. Nevertheless, the ideological practices conducted in the school setting by different actors, both state and non-state organisations, resulted in a set of alternative ideologies, a sociocultural space, as well as the liberation and empowerment of students. At the same time, note that students were not passive. They were active agents with the ability to adopt, adapt, or arrange new ideologies in way that was consistent with their cultural backgrounds in order to illustrate their membership, sense of belonging, claiming space, and different ways of claiming their rights as a cultural citizen, including having a shared ethnic identity and being a member of the border community or a part of the nation-state. These claims depend largely on the situation, benefits, and the power they have during the interaction in a given time.