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biszatt

Rebecca Iszatt
University of Leeds
I am a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds (UK) and a former scholar-in-residence at the Library of Congress’ Kluge Center (2019). My PhD thesis, preliminarily titled “Un/doing Thainess: dis/obedience online” (due for submission in 2022), integrates an inductive analysis of a corpus of several hundred Facebook posts from a range of non-state pages that comprise a representative body of sociopolitical communities, from Bangkokian conservatives to ethnic Malay southerners. My project will uncover what it means to be – or, obstinately not be – Thai from the text up, disregarding a deductive logic that would seek specific identity markers within the dataset. Further, it will gauge the significance of digital space in the regulation of contemporary Thai identity discourses. My project resists complying to a single tradition; it draws influence from social semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis, (meta)ethics, Thai cultural studies, Deleuze, Daoism, and more. I have also worked as a consultant on the Thai market for the brand innovation firm Canopy Insight (2019 – 2020) and as a research assistant for the Thai film production company Tangkwa Matograph (2014 – 2015).