Rachel Anne Tough

In 2025, I was awarded my Ph.D. without corrections for ethnographic research on the COVID-19 pandemic in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, completed in the School of Global Development at the University of East Anglia. My thesis Vietnam's War on COVID-19: an Ethnography of Pandemic in Ho Chi Minh City concerns everyday negotiations between state and citizenry in Vietnam under the country’s strict coronavirus control policy, developing a detailed account of how authority operates in a non-democratic setting. Data were collected in and around one of the city's most severely coronavirus-impacted neighbourhoods during 18 months of fieldwork, using methods including participant observation, interviews, and life histories as well as through a participatory photography project with local university students. The study is one of a limited number of ethnographies of the COVID-19 pandemic informed by data derived through in situ methods. 

In the thesis, I concentrate analytically on three themes emerging from the ethnography, devoting a chapter to each. 'Saigon is bleeding' (Sài Gòn đổ máu) considers norms and values around the just distribution of resources that emerged as the state struggled to feed citizens during citywide lockdown. 'Mētises meet metrices: knowledge frictions in the local implementation of Vietnam's Zero-COVID policy' problematises theorisations of top-down planning that dichotomise officials and subalterns by revealing how low-level officials exploit their embodied knowledge to improvise workable compromises in day-to-day regulation situations. 'Interpellation by infection: sick citizen-subjects under Vietnam's coronavirus control policy' considers how state-society relations are mediated through ideological discourse. For this research, I was awarded the Development Studies Association Thesis Prize.

Alongside my Ph.D. research, I led two collaborative projects documenting endangered cultural heritage in Vietnam to completion, one funded by the British Museum and one by the UK Government's Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF).

In 2024, I was appointed to the UK Young Academy (UKYA) - a network of early career academics, professionals and innovators partnered with the Royal Society and the British Academy - for a five year term in recognition of achievements in my research career to date. Before entering academia, I led a team of City Hall researchers supporting elected politicians to campaign for social and environmental justice for Londoners. 

At UEA, I have taught on eight modules in the School of Global Development and the School of Art, Media and American Studies, including Research Methods in Social Anthropology and Introduction to Anthropology which I also convened (see syllabus). I have also supervised or co-supervised several postgraduate dissertations to completion. 

At SOAS, University of London I taught final year undergraduates on 'Issues in Cities and Development' and postgraduates on 'Human and Critical Security Studies', both within the Department of Development Studies.

Vietnam, ethnography, political anthropology, South East Asia, urban studies, memory, development studies, heritage

Peer review

• Arcadia (Dec 2024 - )
• UKRI Talent Peer Review College - Member (Mar 2023 - Feb 2025)
• Asian Affairs - journal of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs
• African and Asian Studies journal

Conference participation:

• Memory Studies Association conference on Post Socialist Memory Studies (Sep 2020) - individual paper on the panel 'Museums and Memory: War, Patriotism and Trauma' (online)
• Association of Asian Studies conference (Mar 2021) – individual paper outlining doctoral research (online)
• 'Conducting Field Research in Social Sciences' methodological seminar organised by Van Lang University, Vietnam (Jun 2021) - presentation on methodological approach to PhD fieldwork (online)
• American Anthropological Association annual meeting (Nov 2022) - individual paper on the panel 'Work, value, aesthetics and the liminality of life in East Asia' (online)
• 'Bridging epistemic divides in cultural heritage protection' workshop (May 2023) - presented ongoing British Museum cultural heritage documentation project with Vietnamese co-investigators, European University Institute, Florence, Italy 
• 'Heritage, Community, Archives: Methods, Case Studies, Collaboration' conference (June 2023) - presented ongoing AHRC/GCRF-funded COVID-19 material heritage project, Sheffield Hallam University
• European Association for Southeast Asian Studies (EUROSEAS) conference (Sep 2026) - will present individual paper on the panel 'Vietnamese labour mobilities amidst turbulent migratory landscapes', Complutense University, Madrid, Spain

Guest lectures/invited talks:

• Invited by Dr Rylan Higgins to deliver guest lecture 'Anthropology of the COVID-19 pandemic' (Nov 2021) - presented data from fieldwork on COVID-19 in Vietnam to University of St Mary's anthropology students and patrons of Halifax Public Library (Canada) (online)
• Invited by Dr Tram Luong to deliver guest lecture 'Life and liminality during COVID-19: an ethnography of pandemic in Ho Chi Minh City' to students of 'SOC1109 Ethnographic Research Methods' at Fulbright University Vietnam (Nov 2022)
• Invited by Professor Erik Harms to present 'Reality revealed anew: Ho Chi Minh City during pandemic season' at Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies (Nov 2023)
• Invited by Professor John Hutnyk to present 'Uncertainty, serendipity, opportunity: researching the COVID-19 crisis in Ho Chi Minh City ethnographically' at Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Ton Duc Thang University, Vietnam (Feb 2025)
• Invited by Development Studies Association (DSA) as 2026 thesis prize winner to present 'Bureaucratic brokerage: local officials, embodied knowledge and the implementation of Vietnam's Zero-COVID policy' on the panel 'Brokers, agency and power in a fragmenting world' at DSA2026 conference, Dublin, Ireland (Jul 2026)

I am a member of:

• the Vietnam Studies Group of the Association for Asian Studies -  executive committee member 2021-2024
• the Association of South East Asian Studies UK (ASEASUK)
• the Associaton for Asian Studies
• the American Anthropologial Association
• the European Association for Southeast Asian Studies