Presented in person and online; details below.

This study examines the resilience of older adults in urban Chiang Mai, Thailand, focusing on how they actively contribute as caregivers, disaster responders, and community leaders within the contexts of social and environmental precarity. Drawing on the concepts of social networks, affective economy, and resilience, this study investigates how older adults mobilize resources through personal and political networks. It also explores how older adults perform affective labor in care works, and develop coping strategies to receive institutional support. Findings reveal that older adults build informal safety nets through affective labor and community organizing, challenge stereotypes of dependency, and navigate overlapping caregiving and electoral systems shaped by local patronage. This study extends Aulino’s analysis of Thai care as ritualized merit-making by demonstrating how affective relations coexist with obligation-based frameworks. Older adults deploy both moral discourse and affective bonds to sustain care networks. While institutional support is often fragmented or insufficient, older leaders’ contribution reveal resilience not as passive endurance but as resource mobilization and political engagement. This research contributes to anthropological understanding of agings and care in Southeast Asia by foregrounding older adults in structural constraints and illiminating how social networks, affective economies and resilience intersect in everyday practices of care and community building. 

Keywords: affective economy, resilience, social networks, older adults, Chiang Mai

Speaker:
Assoc. Prof. Arratee Ayuttacorn, PhD is a sociologist at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University, Thailand. Her research encompasses cultural studies, community-based resource management and development, gender, and health. She has conducted research on community-based forest management, migration and identity, including work with the Indian community in Chiang Mai. Her recent work focuses on the social dimensions of aging societies, care regimes, and resilience, with particular emphasis on community-based support systems in Chiang Mai, Thailand. She examines how structural inequalities, informal care networks, and local governance shape older adults’ well-being. Her earlier research explored body politics and affective labor in the aviation industry, particularly the representation and regulation of female flight attendants’ bodies within the contexts of nationalism and capitalism.

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1

In-person: H.C Coombs Building, H.C Coombs Building, Seminar Room C, Ground floor (near Coombs Lecture theatre)