Thu Thuy Phan

Medical Anthropology (MSc), 2014
Hertford College, Oxford

Funding: Roland Berger

Thu Thuy graduated with  an MSc in Medical Anthropology in 2014, helping her  to combine her experiences in social work with  academia. She has a first class degree in Liberal Arts and Sciences from the University of Utrecht.

Since completing her master’s degree, she has worked on several research projects involving community initiatives to promote health and inclusion. She conducted a Wellcome-funded oral history project exploring the emergence of the Oxford therapeutic community, and worked with the Department of Primary Care and Health Sciences at the University of Oxford to document experiences of, amongst others, HIV/AIDS, learning disability, and rare genetic diseases.

Recently, Thu enrolled for a PhD in Social and Public Health at the University of Glasgow. For her doctoral research, she is conducting an immersive ethnography exploring alternative, grassroots formulations of citizenship as articulated by people with learning disabilities and mental illness. Working with a community-based art collective, she examines art as a conceptual and methodological tool to understand nonverbal, sensorial, embodied forms of sociality and engagement among vulnerable adults.