Friday Forum: Will Shattuck – “Mobilizing Through Regional Anchors: Chao Suan Yang in Southern Thailand Respond to Falling Rubber Prices”

Mobilizing Through Regional Anchors: Chao Suan Yang in Southern Thailand Respond to Falling Rubber Prices

Will Shattuck
Doctoral Candidate, Department of Geography
UW-Madison

This talk grapples with the tensions between the trans-national scales through which rubber prices in Thailand are determined and the prominence of national and subnational scalar discourses that smallholder rubber farmers, or chao suan yang in Thai, in southern Thailand affix to their own experiences. Through a consideration of different venues in which low rubber prices have been contested over the past several years, including demonstrations in the form of blockades on highways and railroad tracks in Nakhon Si Thammarat Province in 2013, I show how such responses reify senses of regional identity—and its activation, regionalism—which, in turn, are mobilized to challenge and renegotiate existing contours of economic governance.