Jess Auerbach is an NRF-rated anthropologist whose research explores narrative, digital connectivity, sensory experience, communication and education futures. She is passionate about how networks and personal experiences shape individual and collective impact, and she has worked around the world exploring personal and collective transformation. 

Jess has written two books, From Water to Wine: becoming middle class in Angola (also available open access in Portuguese) and Archive of Kindness: Stories of everyday heroism in the South African pandemic. She is currently working on a third book, provisionally entitled Capricious Connections and a Very Long Line: the politics of knowledge infrastructure in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean that explores undersea internet cables that plug Africa into global digital networks. 

Jess has published extensively in academic journals and the public domain on her work on Angola, Mauritius, migration, social stratification, and higher education futures,  and won several awards. She is currently an Iso Lomso Fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study. 

Jess did her undergraduate degree at UCT followed by an MSc in Forced Migration at Oxford where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and a PhD in anthropology at Stanford University. 

She has lived and worked in Angola, Brazil, Mauritius, Mozambique, the UK and USA, and is now based mostly in Cape Town.