Sensing Kawthoolei is my practice-based PhD project with the Karen community along the Thai-Burmese border, displaced by the Burmese civil war. The Karen are an ethnic minority group, with the majority originally residing in Burma. Many of them have been persecuted by the Burmese military junta for several decades and have settled in Thai border areas.

The project output includes a thesis, a set of participatory artworks with the Karen people (drawings, weavings, photos, and sound works), an ethnographic film and an audiovisual soundscape composition in total as a multimodal ethnography. “Sensing” means “to sense” and “Kawthoolei” means the Karen people’s imagined homeland. By exploring their senses such as hearing, vision, imagination, memory, fear and hope, along with my senses as the researcher, it is an experiment in interweaving artistic practice with anthropology.

Participatory Artworks