Research
Research
Embedded Files
Abstract:
In rural, upland northern Thailand, Indigenous Karen (Paganyaw) communities have long practiced diversified subsistence cultivation and forest-based livelihoods. Yet state conservation policies and tourism-led development are reshaping these agrarian systems and livelihoods.
This paper explores how one Karen (Paganyaw) community in Chiang Mai province reconfigures its livelihood strategies amid the decline of swidden cultivation and the rise of elephant tourism as a new rural economy. Beyond subsistence cultivation, villagers are seeking to diversify their households and personal income by participating in this new economic sector. We argue that the transition out of small-scale agriculture into tourism is not a neutral market choice but responds to the same political-economic pressures that have historically displaced swidden systems.
Drawing on 32 qualitative interviews, this ethnographic research examines diverse forms of Indigenous involvement in the elephant tourism supply chain crucially determined by non-capitalist social relations and kinship networks. By identifying the socio-economic conditions – land and capital ownership, and familial and social networks – that result in socially-differentiated and stratified allocation of benefits from elephant tourism, it disenchants the notion of a monolithic ‘community’ yet reveals one empirical case of how Indigenous peoples navigate shifting economies and sustain meaning in their livelihood.
The paper examined the environmental narratives taught in Singapore history textbooks. Since Singapore does not currently have an environmental education curriculum, the mandatory history curriculum taught in all government schools is a rich site of inquiry for studying the environmental education that schoolchildren gain from history textbooks.
Our results show that Singapore's history textbook narratives mostly portray people as independent from the environment. Students also learn that the environment matters less today than in the past, as narratives of the environment are largely found in textbook pages portraying Singapore’s past (the years before independence).
These findings are significant as they exacerbate the modern Singaporean’s inability to recognize their embeddedness within and influence on the nonhuman environment in this moment of climate crisis.
MA Thesis (2026):
Ecotourism and Captivity as Care: Re-valuing Elephant Labor in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Ecotourism and Captivity as Care: Re-valuing Elephant Labor in Chiang Mai, Thailand
Abstract:
Since 1989, captive Asian elephants and their labor have been steadily and increasingly revalued through their commodification in tourism in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Tourism geographers have studied how international ecotourism development extracts value from nature, and contributes to the commodification of nonhuman nature. Political ecologists have also considered the discursive and material harms arising from the politics and practices of ecotourism in Global South countries across an array of empirical cases.
However, we know much less about how value is created out of nature, particularly captive animals, as well as how tourism actors including tourists value animal labor by participating in these inter-species encounters. A better understanding of how value is constructed, negotiated, and contested illuminates the political-economic significance of captive animal labor and encounters between tourists and nonhuman others. It also provides a stronger basis for understanding the future of Thailand's 3,000–4,000 captive elephants as tourism and market forces continue to reshape their lives.
In this thesis I home in on this question by drawing from participant observation and ethnographic fieldwork via 18 visits to elephant tourism venues and 61 semi-structured interviews with tourists, tour guides, tour agents, owners of elephant tourism venues and village locals. Based on this qualitative data, I argue that the revaluing of elephant labor normalizes the logic of commodification of animals as tourism resources and sustains elephant captivity as a form of care by perpetuating ecotourism as a market-based solution to elephant conservation.
Joyful moment captured
Preparing sugarcane, a delicious and sugar snack for the elephants
Summer (2026):
Tending the Shore: Jellyweed Harvesting and the Making of a Satoumi Landscape in Badouzi, Keelung
Tending the Shore: Jellyweed Harvesting and the Making of a Satoumi Landscape in Badouzi, Keelung
Collaborative project with Wai Ziying (National Taiwan University)
Summer Field School Research (South Sulawesi, Indonesia)
Summer Field School Research (South Sulawesi, Indonesia)
In the hills of South Sulawesi, a village called Limapocoe had become a site of complex land conflicts.
We ventured out to Jambua, a hamlet in Limapocce, to explore how land conflicts and migration have shaped the livelihoods of locals. Upon our arrival, there were a few things in the village that caught our attention: there were few young people in Jambua and there were several abandoned houses throughout the village. We found that many individuals resorted to migration as a strategy for livelihood. They had to, because State forest boundaries have put restrictions on many of the villagers' lands, claiming that all the trees—planted by the villagers—were a part of the protected forest. Many villagers migrated far. For some, it has been over 40 years since they left home.
We used participant observation, walking ethnographies and semi-structured interviews to engage with villagers.
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