Migrant youth identities as performances: dress codes and styling in Thai multi-ethnic education

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on clothing policy in schools as a means to understand the Thai state’s management of diversity as well as the ways in which young migrants navigate their belongingness within the state discourse of nationalism. Because of its diverse migrant student population, a Thai state school proclaims itself a multicultural institution and instructs its students to wear ‘national clothes’ (chut pracam chat) every Tuesday. This policy enables migrant children to enter a cultural sphere where Burmese migrants are excluded, but, ironically, the very same clothes simultaneously stamp them as raeng-ngan tangdao, literally translated as ‘alien workers’. Young migrants devise strategies to downplay their alterity in public spaces and question the idea of belongingness and authenticity. Their dress practices reveal theatrical and fleeting performances of identity. But they neither fully assimilate to national standards nor assert completely distinct identities.