ภายถ่ายโดย Chivion Peou

ขอเชิญร่วมฟังการบรรยายพิเศษ

On Transformation of Society and Inequality in Cambodia: Young people negotiating working life and transregional and transnational existence

Chivion Peou
Royal University of Phnom Penh

09.09.2015 | 13.30-16.30 hrs.

Sociology and Anthropology Meeting Room
4th floor, Faculty of Social Administration Building,
Thammasat University, Tha Prachan

ณ ห้องบรรยายโครงการปริญญาเอก คณะสังคมวิทยาและมานุษยวิทยา
ชั้น 4 อาคารคณะสังคมสงเคราะห์ศาสตร์
มหาวิทยาลัยธรรมศาสตร์ ท่าพระจันทร์

abstract

Cambodia’s impressive economic growth following its post-conflict reconstruction in the 1990s has been accompanied by high levels of social and spatial mobility as well as a rapidly transformed social space, engendering novel opportunities but also risks and changing structures of inequality.

This presentation examines this transformation through the experience of a post-conflict generation of young people making the transition into the world of work. It draws on my doctoral research in 2010–14 on young people in Cambodia and my on-going study on Cambodian young labor migrants in Thailand to first illustrate the general patterns of emerging inequality structures and second demonstrate the ways in which young people’s sense making and action strategies are linked to the social volatility of Cambodia. The emerging opportunities and inequality structures for the life course can be broadly expressed in terms of the emerging stratification of passages into working life: higher educational participation for ‘high-status’ jobs among the better resourced (and mainly urban) youth, and migration within or across national borders into labor work mainly among the rural poor. At the socio-structural level, this contributes to an altered structure of inequalities broadly tantamount to the emerging working and educated middle classes. At the interactional level, the transforming society has entailed two differentiated capital conversion strategies for the rural poor and the (often urban) resourceful in the transition toward adulthood, but neither group/strategy is insulated from new risks and uncertainties of the life course in the absence of a welfare state and given the strong family orientation. The talk finally highlights the challenges and risks Cambodian young migrant workers in Thailand face and the strategies they develop to deal with them before making concluding remarks on the precarity of Cambodian lives and social transformation.