The Effect of Identity Negotiation and Contestation Towards the Mindset and Learning Process of Melayu Muslim Youth Under a Thai Education System: A Case Study in Yala, Thailand

Abstract

The process of negotiation and contestation of the education system in Thailand's Deep South is one of constant debate over the appropriate education system for Melayu Muslims. This paper will show how schools in Thailand deep south negotiate modern education policies along with the retention of religious education to strengthen the identity of young Melayu Muslims as their cultural capital. The goal is to explore what education of Melayu Muslims resembles interpretively and how this affects young Melayu Muslims as stakeholders. Related perspectives reflect how youths interpret their identity through behavior and thoughts. Two private Islamic schools and one government school in Yala chosen for the case study. Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice was used to understand the field and type of capital used as source of power in the negotiation and contestation process, as well as habitus to examine and understand the expressions of Melayu Muslim youth reflected in their bodies and minds as recipients of the culture of learning in the educational system.

Results were that all three schools had processes of negotiation and contestation of Melayu Muslim identity occurring under the modernistic trends in the framework of educational development in three forms under different types of capital: 1) cultural capital: negotiation and competition in the form of reproduction and exposure to the new educational mainstream; 2) cultural capital: negotiation and contestation in dismantling the old learning culture model; and 3) negotiating and contesting Melayu Muslim identity in building social capital.

These different forms of negotiation and contestation resulted in Melayu Muslim youth expressing different meanings of Melayu Muslim identity, negotiated by mimesis and expressed corporeally and intellectually. Identity contestation of youths appeared in two areas: 1) physical and 2) online space, revealing identity dynamics of young Melayu Muslims today who strive to self-proclaim more contemporaneously through the influence of education, acquisition of knowledge, and experience from online space, where development and modernity concepts were introduced to their consciousness.