Biography
Pa Pa Phyo is a PhD researcher at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS, The Hague), Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is part of 'The politics of agrarian transformations in Myanmar,' a research and training initiative based at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) of Erasmus University Rotterdam in the Netherlands and Chiang Mai University. She is also part of the European Research Council Advanced Grant Project RRUSHES-5, led by Professor Jun Borras. She holds MA degrees in Gender and Peace Building from University for Peace in Costa Rica, and Political Science from Ateneo de Manila University. Previously employed as a migrant worker in Thailand, she has been working with a local NGO on peace building, environmental sustainability, and food sovereignty since 2008.
Her PhD research, supervised by Professor Jun Borras, is on the political economy of land and migrant labour in the context of production and social reproduction, focusing on and inquiring into Myanmar's migrant farmworkers in Thailand. Her research will attempt to get a better understanding of the relationship between the political economy of land and labour in the context of an indivisible sphere of production and social reproduction. The axes of exploitation and oppression are necessarily intersectional: class, gender and generational- and in the context of Myanmar, also based on ethnicity and nationality. Her research will study a particular subgroup of migrant workers, those who have access to land in Myanmar, either for productive farm or everyday social reproduction, or both; meaning, they can be referred to as farmers, or belonging to a farming household; have migrant wage work, whether longer basis or seasonal and circular- as long as they remain rooted to Myanmar countryside manifesting in many ways: existing obligations to send money back home, thinking of Myanmar village as eventual retirement place or a place for convalescence, etc.; working in the agro-food sector in Thailand which is the most popular destination of Myanmar migrants.
