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This commentary responds to Tim Oakes' analysis of infrastructural power by examining the inherent fragility of mobility infrastructures and their political ramifications. It emphasizes the human element in creating and maintaining these infrastructures, highlighting the intricate interplay of political will, bureaucratic planning, technological know-how, and specialized skills needed for their implementation. The paper contends that the COVID-19 pandemic has starkly demonstrated the vulnerability of mobility infrastructures to rapid collapse. It further explores the concept of infra-politics, referring to subtle acts of resistance within these networks, which significantly disrupt their efficient operation. The Chinese concept of jianghu, representing a metaphorical space of alterity, is introduced to propose that infra-politics might evolve into alternative relational forms, challenging and potentially subverting the dominance of centralized networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically discusses the Hanoi Metro and its role in contemporary urban development processes in Hanoi. It aims to disentangle the complex interplay between the state's urban development goals, local mobility patterns, and Sino-Vietnamese relations that influence discourses surrounding the Hanoi Metro. This paper argues that the Hanoi Metro project demonstrates that mobility infrastructures serve as an arena for state-society negotiations in Vietnamese cities. Rooted in the state's vision of modernity, the metro is promoted as offering an alternative to individual motorized transport, improving urban traffic and mobility for all residents. However, controversies regarding corruption, safety, and Chinese involvement in the financing and construction of Line 2A have negatively affected public perception of the project during its construction period. The potential impact of the Hanoi Metro on urban mobility in a setting dominated by motorbikes is discussed using the mobilities paradigm, with a focus on local mobility practices and experiences. The findings are linked to broader discussions on Chinese investment and historically-rooted notions of modernity and civilization in the context of the long-term development goals of municipal authorities and rising anti-Chinese sentiments in Vietnamese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Macro-level discourses on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) firmly establish China as the sole agent in driving infrastructure development. This article contends that often obscured from view by the discourses on China's dominance are the host country authorities' exercising of agency in infrastructure development under their own jurisdiction. The paper focuses on the actions of the local host country authorities in developing an infrastructure megaproject as a part of the BRI in northern Myanmar's Kachin State. Currently under suspension, the Myitkyina Economic Development Zone (MEDZ, also known as Namjin Industrial Zone) would make an ambitious spatial intervention with wider implications and risks. The paper scrutinizes the 'strategies' by the local authorities in 2019-2020 in their attempts to move the project forward covertly. These include exploiting the project's designation as an economic developing zone to conceal its scale and the inclusion of a major urban development, lack of transparency, and alleged abuse of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the launch of the BRI, particular modes of movement are integral to its vision of what it means to be a modern world citizen. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Southeast Asia, where China-backed infrastructure projects expand, and at great speed. Such infrastructure projects are carriers of particular versions of modernity, promising rapid mobility to populations better connected than ever before. Yet, until now, little attention has been paid to how mobility and promises of mobility intersect with local understandings of development. In the introduction to this special issue, we argue that it is essential to think about the role infrastructure plays in forms of development that place connectivity at the center. We suggest that considering development, mobility and modernity together is enlightening because it interrogates the connections between these interlocking themes. Through an introduction to five ethnographically grounded papers and two commentaries, all of which engage with infrastructures in different contexts throughout Southeast Asia, we demonstrate that there are significant gaps between official policy and lived experience. This makes the need to interrogate what infrastructure, mobilities, and global China really mean all the more pressing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indonesia’s relationship with Papua, its poorest and easternmost region, is still colored by racism. Despite 20 years of special autonomy law (OTSUS) and efforts to improve relations and the status of indigenous Papuans, a shocking incident of large-scale racism in Surabaya in 2019 brought back memories of anti-Papuan discrimination, which OTSUS has failed to solve. The incident triggered horizontal conflict sharpened by an identity contest between Papuans and non-Papuans, reverberating to the present day. Why do Papuans still face conflict after two decades of OTSUS? This paper argues that OTSUS, originally designed to provide legal and cultural recognition to Papuans and their rights within the state, paradoxically failed to guarantee Papuan recognition. This lack of recognition supports increasing calls for independence among Papuan activists and other proindependence organizations. Hence, this situation complicates efforts to reduce violence undertaken not only by state security personnel but also by members of the Free Papua Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the largest group of refugees in Malaysia, the Rohingya. Many Rohingya have made Malaysia their home, even though they have no legal status in the country. When COVID-19 was detected in Malaysia, the government followed a strategy of suppression, with targeted lockdowns in areas of COVID-19 outbreaks. As most refugees work to survive, they hold important front-line jobs and were exposed to COVID-19 at higher rates of infection than Malaysians. In this paper, we trace the way the Malaysian government, Malaysian people, and refugees encountered COVID-19, and how refugees became the subject of enhanced securitization and surveillance based on prejudice. We show how the state enacted securitization first at the borders, before it inverted this process and focused on domestic border work wherein neighborhoods, mosques and markets became central places of immigration control and exclusion for refugees. Based on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in peninsular Malaysia between 2020 and 2021, we argue that the securitization of refugees, their surveillance and even expulsion and eviction demonstrates continued and heightened scapegoating of refugees for all of Malaysia's ills. These actions reinforced the stigma and stereotype of refugees being legally undocumented and therefore outside of and too often unwelcome in the Malaysian body politic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Thai migration to Belgium is numerically a woman-led phenomenon, which has captured social attention for the last decades. This attention entails stereotypes about Thai migrant women as 'workers' in the intimate industry and/or 'exotic wives' of Belgian men. To challenge these stereotypes, the present paper explores the often-ignored dimension of Thai women's sociality. Specifically, it examines the transmission dynamics occurring in their Buddhist social spaces, which shape and reinforce their sense of belonging. To do so, it draws from ethnographic fieldwork with Thai migrant women and key social actors within the Thai population in the country. Data analysis unveils that these women engage in multiform modes of transmission in their Buddhist social spaces. First, they transmit good deeds from the material world to the spiritual realm through merit-making practices and by seeking spiritual guidance in the temple. Second, they pass their socio-cultural ways of belonging to their children by engaging in different socializing activities. And third, they involve themselves in sharing religious faith, material symbols, and tastes described as part of Thai culture. Through this multiform transmission, Thai migrant women confront in subtle ways the common-held views about them at the intersection of their various identities as spouses, mothers, citizens, and Buddhist devotees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective communication plays a part in the success and the sustainability of tourism and hospitality management, including community-based tourism (CBT). In Brunei Darussalam, communication barriers have affected the growth of the CBT industry at both local and national levels. By analysing responses from 16 local CBT operators, this investigation focuses on aspects of communication and its channels in securing sustainability and empowerment of the CBT industry. This study found that the CBT ventures in Brunei include: (1) horizontal/lateral communication between CBT operators and surrounding communities; and (2) top-down communication and bottom-up accessibility between authorities, community leaders, and CBT owners. This paper further discusses how bureaucracy can impede the success of CBT operations, and how a collaborative approach between stakeholders has inspired the formulation of a new Interactional Model of Leadership and Empowerment among CBT stakeholders, which can be used to measure the efficacy of communication among stakeholders in the CBT industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of transnational intimacies and marriages thus far reveal how these relationships are stimulated and constrained by global and local circumstances, cultures, ideas, and practices relating to gender, marriage, and family as well as class and ethnicity. This paper provides insights into the other side of the global process by exploring how these intimate relations generate tensions and challenge cultural ideas and practices regarding gender and social class at the 'local end' of the transnational connections. Drawing on three ethnographic studies in two northeastern Thai villages, my research argues that these marital relationships present a form of women's agency and bring new challenges to masculine identities and subjectivities that place local men in vulnerable positions. Women with Western partners also constitute a new class determined by both their consumption and their lifestyle - which set them apart from other villagers - and their increased ownership of both farm and residential land. Thus, these women form a new class in both Bourdieusian and Marxist senses, although land in this case has less to do with production but rather wellbeing, security, and prosperity. In this light, transnational marriages/intimacies induce the reconfiguring of gender and class in women's natal villages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past two decades, the Mekong region has seen an increase in infrastructure projects aimed at improving transportation and connectivity between China and neighboring countries. These projects feature border control points, customs checkpoints, and security forces, leading to state control over cross-border trade mobility. Logistical power has gradually penetrated the social life in border trading, selectively facilitating certain groups while excluding others. Despite the overarching influence of state control, local traders still assert their agency in shaping cross-border trade practices. However, the transport and border control infrastructures hindered small-scale trading during the global pandemic and filtered out less economically important goods from cross-border mobility. This paper highlights the dynamic relationship between state control and various actors in cross-border trade in the Mekong region. It calls for an inclusive strategy in developing border infrastructure, aiming to ensure equitable benefit distribution and actively integrate the voices and experiences of those most impacted by these changes into the planning and execution of regional projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies about disasters have focused on large-scale and extreme weather events. However, slow-onset hazards such as drought-like seasons and monsoons also pose challenges since they are dynamic and experienced differently from place to place. This paper shows how difficulties in livelihood of the agricultural sector can be made evident using a placebased approach for identifying vulnerability in an island setting. A household survey was conducted to gather perceptions of hazard impacts and coping strategies for extreme weather events and pervasive hazards. Results show that the perceived impacts of hazards differ by events, and respondents cope with extreme weather events and pervasive hazards in almost the same ways. The coping strategies include diversification of livelihood and mutual help, a common tradition among Philippine villages. Community-based disaster risk management strategies through indigenous ways also enabled the island community to bridge the interventions of the national government to the local context in terms of reducing risks. In conclusion, a place-based approach adds value to the current way of assessing vulnerability as it shows that social vulnerability is more dynamic in the local context, and social bonding is crucial for coping during difficult times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the political crises shaping Burmese1 peoples' im-mobilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. As governments around the world urged people to stay at home to be protected from infection and transmission, throughout 2021 many Burmese people protested the military coup of 1 February and fled Myanmar for safety. I problematize these movements of the Burmese peoples through the complex interplay between the triple C of (ethnic) conflict, COVID-19, and coup. I contend that, in Myanmar, adhering to COVID-19 measures emphasizing (self-)isolation and immobility was impossible as they served the military to suppress peoples' critique and protests regarding the government's coup and its mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, Burmese peoples' physical movements and political mobilisation were necessitated to fight against an ensuing political disempowerment of the people. In other words, the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic in correlation with long-standing 'ethnic' conflicts and a military coup required the Burmese peoples to carefully contest an internationally propagated so-called 'new norm' of self-isolation at home and other social distancing measures, which bore the risk of suppression and of renewing political isolation experienced since the country's first military government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protracted refugee situation in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased refugee children's vulnerability due to the non-fulfillment of their fundamental rights, including the right to education. Drawing on data collected through interviews and observation of refugee children during fieldwork in the cities of Batam and Makassar, this paper aims to investigate how and why their access to education has changed during the pandemic. This study finds that, shortly before the pandemic, the Indonesian government provided access to education for refugee children through the issuance of the Circular Letter from the Secretary General of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology Number 752553/A.A4/HK/2019 dated on 10 July 2019. However, the pandemic complicated the accessibility of education for refugee children suggested by the Circular Letter due to lockdown policy and mobility restrictions. The complication is apparent in four aspects of accessibility, namely: access to information, activities in the learning process, environmental support, and the motivation of refugee children. Notwithstanding, this study also finds that the pandemic has induced developments of adaptation strategies through the adoption of online learning among refugee communities to enable wider access to education for refugee children. Therefore, the pandemic may have revealed the urgency for a more rights-based policy on refugee treatment in Indonesia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Festivals play a vital role in catalyzing inclusive development through their ability to increase social capital. They can enhance social ties through creating shared knowledge, building trust, and forming networks. In the Malaysian context, few studies have been done on how festivals promote inclusive development. Hence, this paper seeks to present a case study on Pangkor Island Festival (PIF), which is a Malaysian arts and culture festival, concerning the process, opportunities, and challenges of inclusive development from the perspectives of the festival organizer. In-depth interviews with the festival organizer and curator and field observations were conducted. Findings show that festivals promote inclusive development through a five-phase process, from establishing relationships with residents and exploring local assets to the sustainability of PIF and inclusive development. This study also suggests three-fold opportunities that include community cohesiveness, revitalization, and cultural value restoration as well as challenges of securing suitable stakeholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 interviews with Thai migrants in Brighton, East Sussex. It explores how Thai immigrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and migration pathways mobilize ethnic and non-ethnic forms of capital in their entrepreneurial activities. Thai immigrants constitute a relatively new, small, but internally diverse migrant population in the UK, with female marriage migrants dominating the Thai migrant population in the past two decades. The findings of this study reveal that Thai migrants tend to own small-scale businesses or provide personal services in three sectors: cleaning and care work, beauty and massage, and food and catering. In their interaction with opportunity structures in the UK, Thai restaurant and massage entrepreneurs mobilize the exotic notion of "Thai-ness" to add value to their services catering to local British customers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the notions of mobility, mobility capital, gender, and ageing to analyze marriage migration and the trajectories of geographical and social mobility of Thai-Dutch couples moving from the Netherlands to Thailand. It is based on in-depth interviews with 12 Thai-Dutch couples who moved from the Netherlands to Thailand and resided in Thailand for between three and twelve years. The study explores the key role of mobility capital in stimulating Thai-Dutch couples' imaginations, their perceptions, and their potential for movement. In terms of their 'mobility turn', I argue that their trajectories of mobility and relocation to Thailand should not be understood as a linear and permanent movement from the Netherlands to Thailand. Rather, this mobility is fluid, complicated, and sometimes fragmented. It is marked by the practices of waiting, hesitation to move, imagining their return, preparing to move, having actually returned, and travelling back and forth between Thailand and the Netherlands. It also encompasses local spatial movement in daily life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the largest group of refugees in Malaysia, the Rohingya. Many Rohingya have made Malaysia their home over recent years, even though they have no official legal status in the country. Refugees more broadly are often tolerated as workers but treated as undocumented migrants by the law. When Covid-19 was detected in Malaysia, the government followed a strategy of suppression with targeted lockdowns in areas of Covid-19 outbreaks. As most refugees are forced to work to survive, they hold important front-line jobs. As a result, they were exposed to Covid-19 at higher rates of infection than Malaysians. In this paper we trace the way the Malaysian government, Malaysian people and refugees encountered Covid-19 and how refugees especially became the subject of enhanced securitization and surveillance based on prejudice. We show how the state enacted securitization first on the borders, before it inverted this process and focused on domestic border work, wherein neighborhoods, mosques and markets became central places of immigration control and exclusion for refugees. Based on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in peninsular Malaysia between 2020 and 2021, we argue that the securitization of refugees and migrant workers, their surveillance and even expulsion and eviction demonstrates continued and heightened scapegoating of refugees and migrants for all Malaysia’s ills. These actions reinforced the stigma and stereotype of refugees being legally undocumented and therefore outside of and too often unwelcome in the Malaysian body politic.

Dating apps are digital platforms that mediate meaningful relationships and facilitate digital intimacies. This study examines the construction of social capital by dating app users in Indonesia. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s and Robert D. Putnam’s concepts of social capital as well as the virtual ethnography method, this study focuses on how heterosexual and homosexual users of dating apps in heteronormative Indonesia manage to build digital intimacies and accumulate social capital. This study shows that dating app users in Indonesia assemble social capital through networked individualism and automated connectivity. The results demonstrate that dating app users exploit digital intimacies as resources to expand their networks, which enables them to gain certain benefits. Additionally, homosexual users build digital intimacies to gain a sense of acceptance and belonging in digital space. They show more efforts towards being inclusive and active in accumulating and exchanging social capital than their heterosexual counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The media plays an important role in disseminating vital information and being ‘watchdogs’ of government misconduct. Press freedom is constitutionally guaranteed in the Philippines, but the space for journalists and media companies continues to shrink. This is because constant attempts have been made to suppress and silence them through the government’s targeted attacks, which can be characterized into three categories: classifying media as allies and enemies, the weaponization of laws, and personal and institutional attacks. The emergence of COVID-19 made press freedom even more challenging due to the threat of infection and government-imposed restrictions and measures. This research deployed interviews with multiple journalists and a review of secondary data. The study shows that state interference, challenges in fulfilling journalistic roles, and the obstruction of the free flow of information during the pandemic resulted in three levels of fear among journalists: fear of losing one’s network, fear of losing credibility, and fear of personal safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate the development of charitable crowdfunding and its impacts on Islamic philanthropy and its social justice trajectory in Indonesia. As the largest Muslim country in the world, Indonesia has thrived and undergone some legal and programmatic revolutions to promote social justice through Islamic philanthropy. However, this study demonstrates that the rapid growth of charitable crowdfunding in the last decade has some impacts on the social justice trajectory of Islamic philanthropy, particularly in the areas of inclusivity, sustainability, and governance. This study draws from the case of Kitabisa, the largest crowdfunding platform in Indonesia, by conducting interviews with the founders and users and observing their online interactions on the platform and social media. This study also collects data on Muslim philanthropic Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that actively used Kitabisa to raise funds, with special attention to Aksi Cepat Tanggap (ACT), one of Indonesia's largest Muslim philanthropic NGOs. This study found that the trend of crowdfunding has amplified the inclusive space in Indonesian philanthropy where Muslim NGOs actively provide social services and enact collaborations with non-Muslims. However, through crowdfunding, Muslim NGOs have become more accommodating toward short-term social programs or ‘charity’. The crowdfunding trend has also raised accountability and transparency issues in Indonesian philanthropy. This study argues that the broader involvement of grassroots actors, either individuals or informal communities, through crowdfunding explains its impacts on Indonesian Islamic philanthropy’s trajectory for social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protracted refugee situation in Indonesia during the COVID-19 pandemic has increased refugee children's vulnerability due to the non-fulfillment of their fundamental rights, including the right to education. Drawing on data collected through interviews and observation of refugee children during fieldwork in the cities of Batam and Makassar, this paper aims to investigate how and why their access to education has changed during the pandemic. This study finds that, shortly before the pandemic, the Indonesian government provided access to education for refugee children through the issuance of the Circular Letter from the Secretary General of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology Number 752553/A.A4/HK/2019 dated on 10 July 2019. However, the pandemic complicated the accessibility of education for refugee children suggested by the Circular Letter due to lockdown policy and mobility restrictions. The complication is apparent in four aspects of accessibility, namely: access to information, activities in the learning process, environmental support, and the motivation of refugee children. Notwithstanding, this study also finds that the pandemic has induced developments of adaptation strategies through the adoption of online learning among refugee communities to enable wider access to education for refugee children. Therefore, the pandemic may have revealed the urgency for a more rights-based policy on refugee treatment in Indonesia.

This paper focuses on the political crises shaping Burmese1 peoples’ im-mobilities during the COVID-19 pandemic. As governments around the world urged people to stay at home to be protected from infection and transmission, throughout 2021 many Burmese people protested the military coup of 1 February and fled Myanmar for safety. I problematize these movements of the Burmese peoples through the complex interplay between the triple C of (ethnic) conflict, COVID-19, and coup. I contend that, in Myanmar, adhering to COVID-19 measures emphasizing (self-)isolation and immobility was impossible as they served the military to suppress peoples’ critique and protests regarding the government’s coup and its mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, Burmese peoples’ physical movements and political mobilisation were necessitated to fight against an ensuing political disempowerment of the people. In other words, the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic in correlation with long-standing ‘ethnic’ conflicts and a military coup required the Burmese peoples to carefully contest an internationally propagated so-called ‘new norm’ of self-isolation at home and other social distancing measures, which bore the risk of suppression and of renewing political isolation experienced since the country’s first military government.

Studies about disasters have focused on large-scale and extreme weather events. However, slow-onset hazards such as drought-like seasons and monsoons also pose challenges since they are dynamic and experienced differently from place to place. This paper shows how difficulties in livelihood of the agricultural sector can be made evident using a place-based approach for identifying vulnerability in an island setting. A household survey was conducted to gather perceptions of hazard impacts and coping strategies for extreme weather events and pervasive hazards. Results show that the perceived impacts of hazards differ by events, and respondents cope with extreme weather events and pervasive hazards in almost the same ways. The coping strategies include diversification of livelihood and mutual help, a common tradition among Philippine villages. Community-based disaster risk management strategies through indigenous ways also enabled the island community to bridge the interventions of the national government to the local context in terms of reducing risks. In conclusion, a place-based approach adds value to the current way of assessing vulnerability as it shows that social vulnerability is more dynamic in the local context, and social bonding is crucial for coping during difficult times.

This article seeks to advance understanding of the changing interconnections between rivers, infrastructure, and power relations as well as how these are increasingly shaped by a globalizing China and climate change. To do so, it analyzes damming practices in Cambodia and their evolution under a post-neoliberal, concessionary governing mode that materializes in enclaves of corporate authority under Chinese state-owned enterprises. Drawing from the literature on the political life of Chinese overseas infrastructure projects, this article develops the idea of ambiguously entangled enclaves. The focus is on the four most recent large-scale dams in Cambodia and the kinds of dis/connections, altered hydrosocial relations, and power dynamics they generate. The article highlights patterns of dis/entanglement that illuminate the role of Chinese infrastructural engagement in shaping new political-ecological relations and socio-spatial formations in Cambodia and beyond. It also adds insights into the multidimensional geography of enclavism in the Mekong Region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research examines Chinese investment and the impact of infrastructure projects on the Eastern Economic Corridor project (EEC), a special economic zone linking Thailand with Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Vietnam, and China, which aligns with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing on Actor Network Theory (ANT), this study analyzes emerging Chinese investor networks and the resulting negotiations between various actors such as the Thai state, Chinese and Thai investors, and local farmers. Many Chinese investors have moved their production bases to avoid the tax barriers raised by the United States or Europe, as well as to expand their markets in Southeast Asia. The Thai state offers tax benefits to foreign investors, allowing them to import raw materials and machinery from China, making their production costs lower than those of Thai investors. The findings reveal that the neoliberal state facilitates foreign investors through deregulation: enacting city planning laws that permit the establishment of industrial estates in agricultural zones, thus dispossessing farmers of their land. These factories can release toxic waste, thus impacting the local environment and livelihoods of nearby farmers. Thai businesspeople are often unable to compete with Chinese investors to match their bids. In order to maintain their positions in these economic networks, they build affective relations with Chinese investors. In addition, these affective relations attract resistance and indignation from locals dispossessed of land and resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of transnational intimacies and marriages thus far reveal how these intimate relationships are simulated and constrained by global and local circumstances, cultures, ideas, and practices relating to gender, marriage, and family as well as class and ethnicity. This paper provides insights into the other side of the global process by exploring how these intimate relations generate tensions and challenge cultural ideas and practices regarding gender and social class at the ‘local end’ of the transnational connections. Drawn on three ethnographic studies in two northeastern Thai villages, my research argues that these marital relationships present a form of women’s agency and bring new challenges to masculine identities and subjectivities, placing local men in vulnerable positions. Women with Western partners also constitute a new class determined by both their consumption and their lifestyle – which set them apart from other villagers – and their increased ownership of both farm and residential land. Thus, these women form a new class in both Bourdieusian and Marxist senses, although land in this case has less to do with production but rather wellbeing, security, and prosperity. In this light, transnational marriages/intimacies induce the reconfiguring of gender and class in women’s natal villages.

This paper examines Thai immigrant entrepreneurship in the UK, drawing on 17 inter-views with Thai migrants in Brighton, East Sussex. It explores how Thai immigrants from different socioeconomic backgrounds and migration pathways mobilize ethnic and non-ethnic forms of capital in their entrepreneurial activities. Thai immigrants constitute a relatively new, small, but internally diverse migrant population in the UK, with female marriage migrants dominating the Thai migrant population in the past two decades. The findings of this study reveal that Thai migrants tend to own small-scale businesses or provide personal services in three sectors: cleaning and care work, beauty and massage, and food and catering. In their interaction with opportunity structures in the UK, Thai restaurant and massage entrepreneurs mobilize the exotic notion of “Thai-ness” to add value to their services catering to local British customers.

This paper applies the notions of mobility, mobility capital, gender, and ageing to analyze marriage migration and the trajectories of geographical and social mobility of Thai-Dutch couples moving from the Netherlands to Thailand. It is based on in-depth interviews with 12 Thai-Dutch couples who moved from the Netherlands to Thailand and resided in Thailand for between three and twelve years. The study explores the key role of mobility capital in stimulating Thai-Dutch couples’ imaginations, their perceptions, and their potential for movement. In terms of their ‘mobility turn’, I argue that their trajectories of mobility and relocation to Thailand should not be understood as a linear and permanent movement from the Netherlands to Thailand. Rather, this mobility is fluid, complicated, and sometimes fragmented. It is marked by the practices of waiting, hesitation to move, imagining their return, preparing to move, having actually returned, and travelling back and forth between Thailand and the Netherlands. It also encompasses local spatial move-ment in daily life.

The Thai migration to Belgium is numerically a woman-led phenomenon, which has captured social attention for the last decades. This attention entails stereotypes about Thai migrant women as ‘workers’ in the intimate industry and/or ‘exotic wives’ of Belgian men. To challenge these stereotypes, the present paper explores the often-ignored dimension of Thai women’s sociality. Specifically, it examines the transmission dynamics occurring in their Buddhist social spaces, which shape and reinforce their sense of belonging. To do so, it draws from ethnographic fieldwork with Thai migrant women and key social actors within the Thai population in the country. Data analysis unveils that these women engage in multiform modes of transmission in their Buddhist social spaces. First, they transmit good deeds from the material world to the spiritual realm through merit-making practices and by seeking spiritual guidance in the temple. Second, they pass their socio-cultural ways of belonging to their children by engaging in different socializing activities. And third, they involve themselves in sharing religious faith, material symbols, and tastes described as part of Thai culture. Through this multiform transmission, Thai migrant women confront in subtle ways the common-held views about them at the intersection of their various identities as spouses, mothers, citizens, and Buddhist devotees.

The Thai yaoi culture is getting a lot of attention in several parts of the world. Numerous Thai boy's love (BL) series are a huge hit in Thailand and other countries. Despite the notable success of Thai yaoi and BL culture, there is less attention given to this topic in past studies and literature. Moreover, no study has investigated how yaoi culture may affect travel motivation. Hence, the present study examines the effect of yaoi media consumption on travel motivation of Filipino viewers of Thai boys' love series. A prediction approach was employed, and partial least squares (PLS) path modelling was used to measure the hypothesized relationships. The study reveals that all dimensions of cultural proximity significantly affect Thai yaoi media consumption, and Thai yaoi media consumption was found to have an influence on emotional involvement and travel motivation. Emotional involvement was also found to significantly affect travel motivation, and, at the same time, act as a mediator between Thai yaoi media consumption and travel motivation. The current research offers novel theoretical insights about media consumption and its relation to travel motivation in the context of Thai pop-cultural boys' love series. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia is a sought-after destination for international students, including from countries of the Global South such as Indonesia. Prior to the pandemic, the tertiary education of international students was its second largest export. At the onset of the pandemic, Australia's Prime Minister told international students they should return home immediately, warning them that they would not be supported by the government if they chose to stay. Throughout 2020 and 2021, Australian media outlets offered shocking reports and images of international students who had lost their homes and were queuing at soup kitchens. Experts feared that these images and the overall treatment of international students would do long-lasting damage not only to the education sector but also to Australia's people-to-people relations overseas. In this article, we explore the destinies of postgraduate students from Indonesia during the pandemic in Australia. As Indonesia's closest neighbor, Australia is the preferred destination for Indonesian students studying abroad and Australia has targeted Indonesia as a growth market in recent years. Based on qualitative interview data, we offer a picture of how this cohort of international students "muddled through" the pandemic. We ask what damage may have been done by the Australian government's closure of its international borders and strict pandemic restrictions to its reputation as a welcoming country and center of educational excellence. What consequences might there be for this vital Indonesia-Australia relationship, in particular, and for the future of student and broader university engagement between the two countries? Our findings show a much more optimistic outlook than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many queer foreigners perceive Thailand as a gay paradise. They have an image of the country as having a tolerant attitude towards LGBTIQ+. However, for Thai LGBTIQ+, Western countries evoke wealth, progress, and acceptance where people with a different gender identity or sexual orientation can fully enjoy their rights. Thai LGBTIQ+, like men and women, strive to go abroad seeking a life they dream of. This article aims to give an account of one of these marginalized groups' experience that is often neglected by both Thai and Western transnational scholars. Based on an ethnographic study in four European countries with 26 Thai transgender informants, this article argues that migration needs to be considered as a search for one's well-being, not only in terms of economic aspects, but also in terms of sentimental or emotional needs - that is, the possibility of living their gender and being socially and legally accepted. In this transcultural context, not only do people move across borders, but they also export with them perceptions and understandings about sex, gender, and sexuality from their home country. These aspects are renegotiated and rearticulated in the new socio-cultural milieu of the host countries in order to maximize these new conditions for their own interest. They may or may not reveal their transgender identity, depending on contexts, social interactions, and whom they are dealing with. Their transgender identity can offer them advantages, particularly in the realm of sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The migration flows connecting Thailand and Europe have constructed social spaces in which different stereotypes regarding Thais and Europeans emerge, perpetuate, and circulate, thereby affecting to various extents the lives of these individuals. To challenge these stereotypes, the present special issue takes into account the mechanisms of social categorization at transnational and local dimensions in three critical steps. First, it adopts an inclusive stance by not limiting itself to heterosexual relationships involving Thais and Europeans. Second, it shifts the scholarly gaze from marriage and family issues to Thai migrants' mobilities in spatial, social, and intergenerational terms. And third, it highlights Thai migrants' engagement in the labor market as intimate workers and entrepreneurs to uncover the factors shaping their (re)productive labor and social incorporation in their receiving countries. Using an intersectional approach, this special issue presents six empirically grounded case studies to unveil often-neglected dimensions and complexities of Europe-Thailand transnational migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]