THE IMPACTS OF MIGRATION ON MYANMAR WOMEN’S IDENTITY AND CONNECTEDNESS TO THE LAND AND FOOD

In the 21st century, Myanmar has become the largest migration source country in the Greater Mekong Sub-region (Kusakabe & Pearson, 2010). To achieve its economic goals, the government has prioritized the confiscation and reallocation of communal lands, which has resulted in a growing class of landless and dispossessed citizens (Franco, Twomey, Ju, Vervest, & Kramer, 2015). This has resulted in the wide-scale process of Myanmar’s rural women’s disinheritance from the land and food, as they are expropriated from the home of their ancestors and forced to migrate to urban centers to earn a livelihood. The proposed study will examine and identify the impacts of rural to urban migration on Myanmar women’s individual identity and connectedness towards the land and food. A cross-sectional study of rural women in Myanmar and Myanmar migrant women living in Bangkok, Thailand will be conducted. Participants will complete a survey/questionnaire containing measures of four constructs: 1) salience of the land to identity, 2) salience of food to identity, 3) connectedness to the land and 4) connectedness to food. It is hypothesized that the salience of the land and food to identity will be higher for rural women than for urban migrants. It is also hypothesized that women living in rural environments will have higher feelings of connection to food when compared to women living in urban environments. Finally, the influence of time away from origin and participants’ age will also be analyzed and discussed. The findings from this study may provide insight into the personal challenges and internal struggles Myanmar’s women face when moving to a new environment. In addition, this study may broaden the relatively scarce literature regarding Myanmar women, serving as an important basis for beginning to understand the experiences of this underrepresented population within the psychological literature