Tag: postgraduate

programme

9.30 | registration

9.50 – 10.00 | opening remarks

• asst. prof. Chantanee CHAROENSRI, PhD
  Dean, Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology

10.00 – 13.00 | Exploring the Texts and Minds of Power: Sociological insights from official state documents

• Mona Lisa in Manchuria: Ambiguity and network centrality during the Chinese Civil War
  Min Ye Paing HEIN, PhD
  research fellow (2024-2025)

• Xenophobia and Bureaucratic Rationality: What police Press releases can tell us about the discursive basis of migration policy (the case of Siberia)
  Dmitry TIMOSHKIN, PhD
  research fellow (2024-2025)

• chair
  assoc. prof. Yukti MUKDAWIJITRA, PhD 
  Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology

abstracts

Mona Lisa in Manchuria: Ambiguity and network centrality during the Chinese Civil War
Min Ye Paing HEIN, PhD

In 1930, on the eve of China’s Central Plains War, Marshal Zhang Xueliang issued a cryptically cordial circular telegram urging peace between rival factions. Laced with ambiguity, the message triggered competing interpretations and confusion across the political spectrum—particularly within the Nanjing government—making it a classic instance of robust action.

This paper uses Zhang’s March 1st telegram to extend Padgett and Ansell’s (1993) theory of robust action. While existing accounts focus on actors’ structurally privileged positions in multiplex networks, I argue that robustness also depends on network strategies: the active cultivation, calibration, and management of ties amid deep uncertainty.

Zhang’s ability to sustain multiple meanings for multiple audiences was not a product of structural luck, but of strategic effort—managing rival networks, manipulating expectations, and embedding ambiguity within carefully maintained relationships. His case demonstrates that robust action is not merely structural but fundamentally strategic.

Xenophobia and Bureaucratic Rationality: What police Press releases can tell us about the discursive basis of migration policy (the case of Siberia)
Dmitry TIMOSHKIN, PhD

This presentation investigates how texts produced by regional state authorities in Russia construct migration-related discourse. These texts are approached through a “soft” constructionist lens, interpreting them as tools for problematizing social processes and for producing and sustaining a discourse of power.

The study combines quantitative content analysis and discourse analysis to identify “chains of equivalence” that imbue the nodal signifier “migration” with meaning in official texts. It focuses on the social contexts assigned to migrants, the spaces they are said to occupy, and the actions in which they are involved—as both subjects and objects.

The study posits that in Russia’s regions, the official migration narrative is primarily shaped by the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and municipal authorities. Both adopt a strategy of problematizing migration, portraying migrants as a problematic group. This framing has two dominant dimensions: first, migrants are seen as disruptors of the established moral order (“traditional values”); second, they are constructed as a potential source of violence (e.g., crime, terrorism, extremism).

In MVD discourse, migrants are portrayed simultaneously as a threat and a resource—as an economic foundation for an extractive logic. Practices such as raids function both as tools for revenue generation and as mechanisms to boost performance metrics. The use of violence as a primary extractive method is justified through the portrayal of migrants as inherently suspicious, posing risks to both “operational stability” and “traditional values.” Coercive actions are framed as effective and necessary; prosecuting “illegal” migrants is presented as the optimal solution to the problem of illegal migration. Even low crime rates among migrants are framed as a direct result of MVD intervention.