Syracuse University SURFACE Dissertations - ALL SURFACE May 2019 Masculinized Labor Activism and Geographies of Household Reproduction in Thailand’s ‘Detroit’ Kriangsak Teerakowitkajorn Syracuse University Follow this and additional works at: https://surface.syr.edu/etd Part of the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Teerakowitkajorn, Kriangsak, "Masculinized Labor Activism and Geographies of Household Reproduction in Thailand’s ‘Detroit’" (2019). Dissertations - ALL. 1033. https://surface.syr.edu/etd/1033 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the SURFACE at SURFACE. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations - ALL by an authorized administrator of SURFACE. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Abstract This PhD dissertation project focuses on the collective agency of Thai organized workers—a group of regional migrant workers in one of Thailand’s most industrialized areas—whose labor geography and organizations were conditioned by Thai state-capital- labor relations. It examines how the social, political and geographical organizations of Thai workers shape their practices of labor activism. By linking workers’ ties to their place of origin with the new geography of automotive production in Thailand’s Eastern seaboard, this dissertation examines the agency of workers through labor activism and its relationships to migration—a geographical mechanism that bridges production and reproduction across workers’ multi-sited households. This dissertation builds on the critical traditions within Human Geography as well as the work of feminist geographers to center the role of households and cultural practices of labor activism. By bringing together processes of production and social reproduction often examined separately, it sheds light on the ways in which gender and class politics within labor activism are inextricably linked to the division of labor within spatially extended households of Thai migrant workers.