They Are ‘Asians Just Like Us’: Filipino Teachers, Colonial Aesthetics and English Language Education in Thailand

Filipino teachers have become the largest group of foreign teachers in Thailand as English language education gains increasing importance in the kingdom. Their migratory experience, however, demonstrates that schools favour white native English speakers (NES) over them. Differential treatments of Filipino and white NES teachers in Thai schools are manifested overtly in the form of a pay gap and in more subtle micropolitics of bodily management. By examining a postcolonial view and the notion of English language teaching as aesthetic labour, Filipino teachers are found to face racialized and gendered discrimination in English language education in Thailand.