Participatory Communication of Thai Youth in Strengthening Pride in Their Local Southern Identity

The southern people in Thailand are often questioned and given negative connotations by society and the government. The media also portrays stereotypical images of southerners and characterizes them as having a stagnant identity. Most of it is constructed through the eyes of an "outsider," who would present the southern community in a more negative light than a positive one. This study aims to create a participatory communication process among the target youth by establishing a prototype media kit and enhancing pride in the southern identity through participatory action research among junior high school students as active audiences and students in the change agent communicator group. The study revealed that the participatory communication process has created a communication story arising from the exchange of experiences of the target groups with regards to their pride in their southern identity. The process of collecting information on the use of words that oppress Southern localities eventually led to the setting up of an entry point as the starting point to communicate the narrative for "transforming pain points into proud points", to change negative experiences that are painful points and transform them into feelings of positive identification reinforcement and shift their mindsets from forbidding others to mock them into an immunity against mockery. It has also revealed empirical results with regards to building pride in the southern region's local identity of the target group and the ability to re-process the application of participative communication processes to building acceptance of diversity and cultural pride. Keywords: Local identity, proud identity, media prototype, participatory communication, Southern Thai youth.