Being in the Present, Making of the Future: How Thai LGBTIQNA+ Youth Engage in the Process of Worldmaking

• In Event: Poster Session 9
  In Poster Session: Being in the Present, Making of the Future: How Thai LGBTIQNA+ Youth Engage in the Process of Worldmaking

Proposal

Students have been central actors in the present call for envisioning what the future of education can be in Thailand. The “Bad Students'' group has utilized nonviolent action, tactical and digital creativity, and counteracting repression (Sombatpoonsiri & Kri-aksorn, 2021) to call for an end to harassment against students advocating for democracy, revocation of obsolete and abusive school regulations, and reforming the education system with students’ full participation (Phasuk, 2020; “Students rally at ministry to repeat demands”, 2020). For LGBTIQNA+ students specifically, there have been calls for more positive representation in the curriculum and agency towards uniform and hairstyle regulations (Magness, 2020).

This presentation builds on decades of research, with an aim to make sense of how queer youth aspire for the future and how it impacts their educational and life trajectories. Therefore, I will analyze how Thai LGBTIQNA+ children and youth articulate these life aspirations, advice for other LGBTIQNA+ children and youth, advice and expectations for non-governmental organizations and the Thai state/government, messages to the research team and [organization], and societal change. Moreover, in this presentation I ask: What is the relationship between Thai LGBTIQNA+ children and youths’ internalized sense of time & change and their environmental & societal conditions? Centering these narratives allows for a broader analysis into how Thai LGBTIQNA+ youth are engaging in the ever-evolving process of their own construction of the Self, deconstructing oppressive norms and systems, and dreaming of new possibilities. In the field of Comparative and International Education, it is imperative to center these voices and their efforts and developments as it relates to their educational and learning journeys. It also highlights how Thai LGBTIQNA+ children and youth are engaging in a present process of future worldmaking.

In this presentation, I mobilize the concept of queer worldmaking to analyze these narratives. Queer worldmaking has been defined in numerous ways: as a “mode of being in the world that is also inventing the world” (Munoz, 1999, p. 121), as daily improvisations to (re)fashion new ways of being and transforming lived conditions (Berlant & Warner, 1998), as a bottom-up engagement with the everyday (Nakayama & Morris, 2015), among others. Queer worldmaking invites ongoing awareness and engagement to the quotidian realities of queer youth (West, et al., 2013) beyond assimilationist heteronormative, reproductive logic. It instead asks for “the inhabitation of and living into otherwise possibilities” (Crawley, 2016, p. 2; emphasis original). In this presentation, Thai queer youth create narratives about their ongoing process of making the life they want through intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, and societal levels. It also demonstrates how these levels are interconnected and interact with each other. The recognition of how queer youth aspire for the future while living in the present provides an opportunity to envision new ways of being: the making of new worlds.

This paper stems from a larger research project conducted between December 2021-December 2022. For this research, [organization] collaborated with a research team based at [university] and [university]. The project collected and analyzed quantitative and qualitative primary data from children and youth (aged 15-24 years) with diverse SOGIESC in all regions of Thailand in order to explore their mental health and factors influencing it, including resilience and its predictors as a protective factor. The study was a convergent mixed methods study. We conducted 38 semi-structured online and text chat interviews. The data was translated from Thai to English. For coding, I conducted a first level coding and analysis (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014; Saldaña, 2013), wrote reflective memos, and then conducted a second cycle of focused coding.

This presentation will highlight how Thai LGBTIQNA+ youth engage in a process of worldmaking. This process of making the world showed up at the intrapersonal, institutional, and process-oriented levels. It builds upon previous academic literature that moves away from deficit, risk-based narratives and instead centers the voices of queer youth in the active process of creating the world they hope to see. The narratives shared will elicit numerous further questions, in conversation with the conference theme, that will be discussed in the presentation: How does being LGBTIQNA+ affect life trajectories and schooling? What determines how Thai LGBTIQNA+ youth aspire? What is even possible to change? This being-in-process is the core of queer worldmaking as it centers how the past impacts the present day as well as the futures they want to create. It provides possibilities into a new future on the horizon with agentive developments of Self and systems through time and change.

Author

• Cody Freeman, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities