Rachel Tough

I am a final-year Ph.D. researcher in the School of Global Development at the University of East Anglia. I am currently finalising my doctoral thesis 'Vietnam's War on COVID-19: an Ethnography of Pandemic in Ho Chi Minh City' and undertake my viva in March 2025. My dissertation focuses on everyday negotiations between state and citizenry in Vietnam under the country’s strict coronavirus control policy. I concentrate analytically on three areas emerging from the ethnography - civilisational discourse, bureaucratic mediation, and resource governance -  developing a detailed account of how authority operates in non-democratic settings.

Data were collected in and around one of Ho Chi Minh City’s most severely coronavirus-impacted neighbourhoods during 18 months of fieldwork, using methods including participant observation, interviews, life histories, and through a participatory photography project with local university students. The study is one of a limited number of long-term ethnographies of the recent pandemic informed by data derived through in situ methods. Support for this research has been gratefully received from the Leverhulme Trust and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

I am currently leading two collaborative public anthropology projects funded by the British Museum and the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council documenting endangered cultural heritage in Vietnam. I was recently 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 - 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. 

I have supervised four postgraduate dissertations to completion at UEA. In 2023, 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 at SOAS. Since 2020, I have taught on eight other modules in UEA's School of Global Development and in the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, including Research Methods in Social Anthropology and Introduction to Anthropology which I also convened (see syllabus).

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:

• Post Socialist Memory Studies conference (Sep 2020) - panellist on session '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', Van Lang University, Ho Chi Minh City, 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)
• Presented ongoing British Museum cultural heritage documentation project with three Vietnamese co-investigators and research assistants at 'Bridging epistemic divides in cultural heritage protection' workshop, European University Institute, Florence, Italy (May 2023)
• Presented ongoing AHRC/GCRF funded COVID-19 material heritage project at 'Heritage, Community, Archives: Methods, Case Studies, Collaboration' conference, Sheffield Hallam University (June 2023)
• World Anthropological Union Congress (Nov 2024, online) - presented individual paper 'Uncertainty, serendipity, opportunity: researching the COVID-19 crisis in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam ethnographically' on the panel 'Between past and present: creating anthropological knowledge of recent events'.

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 Dr David Koh to present 'Metises meet metrices: mediating knowledge frictions in the local implementation of Vietnam's Zero-COVID policy' to Global Perspectives class at VinUniversity, Hanoi (Apr 2025)

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 Postcolonial Studies Association