our team

Panitee (Suksomboon) Brown

Panitee (Suksomboon) Brown is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand. She obtained her PhD’s Degree in Sociology from Leiden University, the Netherlands in 2009. Her dissertation focused on cross-cultural marriages and transnational families of Thai migrant women who married a Dutch man and moved to the Netherlands. Her topics of research are cross-cultural marriage and migration, elderly care and gender issues on multiculturalism. She had a paper on “Sending Remittances: Cross-Border Negotiation of Family Values among Thai Migrant Women and Their Dutch Husband published with Palgrave Mcmillan in 2016. Her recent paper on “Shades of Friendship among Thai Women in the Netherlands” was published with Brill in 2017.

Wilasinee Pananakhonsab

Wilasinee Pananakhonsab is Lecturer in Sociology at Faculty of Sociology and Anthropology, Thammasat University, Thailand. She completed her Ph.D. at Latrobe University, Australia, in 2015. Her research interests include family, intimate relationships, marriage migrations, and online methodology. She is the author of Love and Intimacy in Online Cross-Cultural Relationships (Palgrave, 2016)

Chantanee Charoensri

Chantanee Charoensri is lecturer in Sociology at Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand since 2001. Her research interests include mobilities, migration, sociology of work and sociological theory. She has recently finished a research project on “highly skilled migration in Thailand” and is currently conducting a research on “ethnic entrepreneurs and Thai marriage migration” and “Mobility and Bangkok city”. Her publications include Postmodernism and Sociology, Science-Non-science: Social Science inside out (editor), The Foucault Critical Reader (editor) and “Thai Daughters, English Wives: A Critical Ethnography of Transnational Lives” (in Contemporary Socio-Cultural and Political Perspectives in Thailand).  She currently serves as the director of Center for Contemporary Social and Cultural Studies (CCSCS).

Soimart Rungmanee

Soimart Rungmanee is a lecturer and researcher at the School of Development Studies, Thammasat University, Bangkok, Thailand. Prior to that, she was a research assistant at UNESCO and UNDP Bangkok involved in projects “Indigenous People in the Protected Areas in the Andaman Sea” and   “Mobility and HIV/AIDS Vulnerability in the Mekong Sub-region.”  Her expertise lies in the intersections of rural sociology, community based disaster management, and sociology of development. Her research interest covers the themes of migration and rural change and politics of natural resource management.  She is currently conducting research projects on crop booms and migration in Lao PDR and the transformation and persistence of smallholders in Central Thailand to understand rural livelihoods and changes in contemporary Southeast Asia. She has published my research in the following international peer-reviewed journals: Population Space and Place, Asia Pacific Viewpoint and Australian Geographer.

Pataya Ruenkaew

Pataya Ruenkaew is based in Bielefeld, Germany, where she works as an independent researcher and social consultant, and a researcher associated with Asian Research Center for Migration, Institute of Asian Studies, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. She graduated from University of Bielefeld in Gemany as a doctorat in social Science. Her areas of interests are international female and child migration, traffic in children and women, and Thai communities outside Thailand. Her scientific works include

  • empirical studies on marriage migration of Thai women to Germany and on power relationships within Thai-German marriages (both at the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University),

  • a study on Thai female migration to Japan (research fellow at the Institute of Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University, Tokyo, under the API Fellowship program),

  • a report on the rights of Thai women to migrate to work abroad (on behalf of the National Human Rights Commission of Thailand),

  • a comparative study on the living conditions and problems of the subsequently immigrated children in Japan and Germany (funded by Keisen University, Tokyo),

  • a study of the social integration of foreign women and their children multi-culture of Filipina and Thai women in Fukuoka prefecture (funded by the Kitakyushu Forum on Asian Women, Kitakyushu, Japan), and.

  • a study on Thais and the formation of Thai communities in Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan (funded by the Thailand Research Fund (TRF)).

She is a founder of THARA Association (Thai Women Articulate Their Rights Abroad) and NTO (Network Thai Overseas), the organizations working to support Thai migrants in Germany.

Sirijit Sunanta

Sirijit Sunanta is assistant professor in Sociology and Anthropology and chair of the PhD Program in Multicultural Studies at the Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia, Mahidol University. She has taught graduate courses on Gender Studies, Globalization and Cross-Border Cultures, Migration and Transnationalism, and Theory in Multicultural Studies. Sirijit’s research interests include gender and migration, globalization and food cultures, and the politics of diversity in Thailand. Her research on gendered migration between Thailand and Europe has been facilitated by her mobilities to and collaborations with European migration research institutions, e.g., the Max Planck Institute for the Studies of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany, the Department of Geography, University of Vienna, Austria, and the Sussex Centre for Migration Research, UK. Sirijit has published her research in leading academic journals such as Gender, Place and Culture, Annals of Tourism Research and Critical Asian Studies. Her current research projects focus on the globalization of care, intimate and bodily labour in the Thai health and well-being tourism industry, and the transnational Phu-Tai ethnic identity revival movement in Thailand and its neighboring countries.

Patcharin Lapanun

Patcharin Lapanun is a lecture in Sociology and Anthropology and chair of the MA program in Sociology, Khon Kaen University (KKU). She has taught Gender Studies, Sociology of Sexuality, Sociological Theories, and Qualitative Research Methodology.  Her research interests include gender and development, migration and ‘the left-behind’; transnational marriage and migration, global care regime and cross-border studies.  Patcharin’s forthcoming book is “Love, Money and Obligations: Transnational Marriage in a Northeastern Thai Village” (NUS Press); she is also a co-author of “Village-based Silk Production in Transition, Northeast Thailand” (2012) (White Lotus) and “Cross-Cultural Marriage: Stage of Knowledge” (2007) (CERP, KKU -Thai Language). Her recent research articles in academic journals and book chapters include “Masculinity, Marriage and Migration: Farang Migrant Men in Thailand” (2018, Asian Journal of Social Science); “It’s Not Just about Money: Transnational Marriage of Isan Women” (2012, Journal of Mekong Society); “Social Relations and Tensions in Transnational Marriage for Rural Women in Isan Thailand” (in The Family in Flux in Southeast Asia: Institution, Ideology, Practice (2012), Kyoto University and Silkworm Books); “Mia farang: An Emergence of a New ‘Class’ in (Rural) Thai Society” (in Culture is Power (2015), Chiang Mai University – Thai Language).

Busarin Lertchavalitsakul

Busarin Lertchavalitsakul is a lecturer at the department of Sociology and Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences, Naresuan University. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in the areas of development studies, borderland studies, migration and mobility, and food and culture. Her recent works extracted from her PhD dissertation on the Shan migrants’ cross-border mobility are published in the peer-reviewed journals such as Journal of Burma Studies, SOJOURN, and in the collected volume of The Informal Economy: Exploring Drivers and Practices (2017, Routledge). For the past decade, she has researched among the Shan ethnic migrants whose life trajectories reflect their fluid and shifted mobility patterns as well as their dynamic consumption and foodways in Thailand. In recent years, Busarin has also developed her interests in researching among Thai migrants living in the Netherlands where she used her participant observation while pursuing her PhD. So migration policies and management under the cultural citizenship regime is another aspect that she has been exploring.

Eric C. Thompson

Eric C. Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Before joining NUS, he completed a PhD in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California Los Angeles. He teaches anthropology, gender studies, Southeast Asian studies, and research methods. His research spans field sites across Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. His research interests include transnational networking, gender and power dynamics, urbanism, agrarian transitions, and ASEAN regionalism. His work has appeared in the journals American Ethnologist, Asian Studies Review, Contemporary Southeast Asia, Current Anthropology, Gender, Place and Culture, Global Networks, Political Geography, and Urban Studies, among others. He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (NUS Press, 2007), co-author of Awareness and Attitudes toward ASEAN (ISEAS, 2007), and Do Young People Know ASEAN? (ISEAS Press, 2016), and co-editor of Cleavage, Connection and Conflict in Rural, Urban, and Contemporary Asia (Springer, 2012) and Southeast Asian Anthropologies (NUS Press, forthcoming).