Title: Education as resistance : post-coup university students' educational choices in Yangon and Mandalay, Myanmar
Author: Phyu Hnin Thawda
Year: 2025
Keywords: epistemic resistance, capability deprivation, Myanmar higher education, educational credentialism, post-coup student agency
Themes: Education, Migration
Advisor(s): Carl Nigel Middleton
The full thesis available here.
Abstract: The 1st February 2021 military coup in Myanmar precipitated one of the most severe higher education crises in contemporary Southeast Asia. This thesis examines how post-coup university students in Yangon and Mandalay construct educational choices as an act of resistance, and how they sustain those choices amid tension between academic success and the precarity of professional development. Framed through three interlocking theoretical lenses in epistemic resistance and decoloniality, the capability deprivation approach, and the concept of revolutionary everyday life and contentious politics. The study compares the experiences of social science and medical science students, whose disciplinary contexts differently constrain the feasibility of alternative, non-state education. Employing a qualitative, phenomenological research design supplemented by comparative case analysis, the study draws on semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participants purposively across four groups, defined by discipline (medical/social science) and educational pathway (alternative provider/return to public university), alongside documentary analysis of policy and institutional sources. Findings in the thesis showed that how post-coup university students expressed “education as resistance” through participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement, made educational choices that shaped by four different interacting factors evaluating educational legitimacy and sustain their resistance to knowledge system under the military regime. The thesis contributes an empirically grounded account of student political agency under authoritarian rupture and offers policy recommendations to support alternative educational pathways and strengthen credential-recognition advocacy for Myanmar's displaced student population.