"Ib txwm nyob tej teb tej chaws no": Resistance and Belonging Through Storywork

• In Event: Transforming Schools: Centering HMong Agents, Belonging, and Inclusivity

Abstract

Objectives:
Recent local and global educational policies have attempted to build a more democratic government and inclusive education system for the diverse population in Thailand, but HMong people are often excluded based on legal classifications as “migrants, stateless, and hill tribes”. When educational policies and practices offer limited conceptions of belonging, how do HMong youth demand inclusive and relevant educational opportunities? This presentation focuses on how HMong youth utilize their indigenous knowledge to redefine and remake homeplace as counternarratives to imperial definitions of citizenship and belonging at Ban HMong Zos School (BHZS) , a public school established for a predominately-HMong population in northern Thailand.

Theoretical Framework:
Drawing on the anthropology of citizenship education, im/migration studies, and Critical Refugee and statelessness studies, the larger study examines how HMong youth navigate exclusionary practices of citizenship and belonging within a nationalistic, neoliberal school in northern Thailand. Considering the ways schools can be a place of precarity between being HMong and becoming something of Thailand (Johnson, 2005), this presentation interrogates the everyday practices of home-making to understand how educational spaces are sites of struggle for displaced people to forge a place to belong and make a home. While home and displacement are often constructed in opposition to one another, Zion-Waldoks and Motazfi-Haller (2018) argue that displacement and home are in fact “interrelated, processual, perhaps even potentially simultaneous experiences” for displaced people (p. 180). Rather than framing home and displacement as opposing, displaced individuals can simultaneously be displaced and at home as Latina feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldua (1987) presents in Borderland. Thus, this presentation builds on this framework to consider a third space where HMong youth contend with being displaced as stateless people without having left home.

Methods and Data:
This 12-month critical ethnography followed HMong parents, community leaders, and secondary school students over a span of 12 months (March 2019-February 2020) to observe how formal curricula, state policies, and daily educational practices influence the ways HMong make sense of home, schools, and the state. Combining decolonial methodology with feminist methodology, this paper expose the social hierarchies and power relations (re)produced by historical, political, economic, and sociocultural processes (Fitzpatrick, 2013; Gailey, 2015; hooks, 1990; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). I draw from these three data sources: (a) participant observation of classrooms, common school spaces, and community events; (b) semi-structured interviews; and (c) document analysis.

Results:
In answering how HMong people use education to articulate their politics of belonging and everyday practices of home-making, I argue that HMong students engage in processes of storywork to forge spaces of belonging beyond nation-centric frameworks. Specifically, this paper highlights the ways HMong youth resist and determine a homeplace through everyday practices of home-making.

Significance:
Studying statelessness in the intersection of citizenship, migration, and education pushes schools to articulate what investment in the human agent looks like for displaced students. This work adds to the understanding of how stateless people forge spaces of belonging despite hegemonic discourses of marginalization and claims of inclusivity that displace them.

Author

• Choua P. Xiong, University of Wisconsin - Oshkosh