Cholthira Satyawadhna

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Cholthira Satyawadhna is an anthropologist from Thailand. Since 2001, she has served as director of the Thai-Asian Studies Center of Rangsit Research Institute, Rangsit University, Thailand. She is also a literary critic and a textile collector and has published books on Thai literature, Thai and Lao textiles, Tai and Lawa ethnohistory, Pai-Yue, and the Dong in China.

At the Radcliffe Institute, she will write a book on the history of women in Thailand and their grassroots struggle for community rights: “Unheard History, Unsung Heroines, and Unvoiced Community Rights: Thailand in Crisis.” The book will contribute a new body of knowledge and new paradigm on local community rights in Thailand within the eco-socio-cultural and political contexts of Southeast Asia. Various case studies of human rights violations and community rights invasions across Thailand will be unmasked, critically analyzed, and further conceptualized to contribute a novel theoretical ground to the richness of Southeast Asian anthropology. The book will suggest strategic policy as alternatives for the marginalized communities in crisis, particularly in Thailand, while echoing the voice of outsiders, especially the marginalized grassroots women in local communities, in order to offer a way out from their critical dilemma and bring it to the attention of the international world.

Satyawadhna graduated from Chulalongkorn University, where she received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Thai language and literature, and from Australian National University, where she earned a doctoral degree in anthropology. Since 1999, she has received four research grants from the Thailand Research Fund (TRF), an agency under the Prime Minister’s Office that provides research grants.