Verification limbo: Digitalizing identity, schools, and protracted exclusion in northern Thailand

Dr Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul - Senior Lecturer in Sociology/Social Policy

In contemporary Thailand, educational attainment constitutes one of the few pathways through which children born to non-citizen parents may acquire recognition as citizens. Yet schools have become increasingly integrated into digital identity infrastructures, generating, verifying, and circulating the information upon which citizenship claims depend. As a result, the very institution positioned as a pathway out of statelessness has become a key site through which legal exclusion is reproduced. Drawing on combined years of fieldwork in northern Thailand, we demonstrate how bureaucratic errors, omission and unevenness outside the civil registration system can have lifelong and everyday repercussions for stateless persons as the country is undergoing digitalization of identification. We argue that digitalization does not escape the limits of the documentary state. Rather, it redistributes the work of identification and verification across an expanding network of teachers, educational administrators, health care workers, bank employees, and other state and private-sector actors who often possess limited training, uneven authority, and discretionary power. By foregrounding how identification errors, operational ambiguities, and institutional disjunctures become embedded within and between digitalized systems, we show how everyday verification practices generate what we term verification limbo: a condition in which citizenship remains theoretically attainable yet practically deferred.

Janepicha Cheva-Isarakul is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology/Social Policy. She has been conducting longitudinal research on childhood statelessness in northern Thailand since 2015. Her research examines the intersections between law, mobility, migration and statelessness. She also has conducted qualitative research on statelessness among a mobile maritime population (the Moken) in southern Thailand. Her research cuts across the disciplines of anthropology, social policy, sociology, childhood studies, Thai studies and Asian law and society. Prior to joining academia, Janepicha worked in the international development sector.

Amanda Flaim is an Associate Professor at Department of Sociology, Michigan State University.She studies problems and paradoxes in human rights policy, including statelessness and citizenship, human trafficking, and the global expansion of rights to education and birth registration. Her current research projects explore the risk of trafficking among Cambodian and Burmese men and boys into the Thai fishing industry, and the causes and consequences of statelessness in Thailand and Nepal.

This seminar will be held ‘In person’.