Profile with Jess Auerbach
Jess Auerbach [Jahajeeah] (South Africa-at-Large & St Antony’s 2009) is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town. She is the director for the MPhil in Inclusive Innovation, the author of two books and multiple academic articles, and the recipient of several prizes for scholarly and public excellence including a Presidential Award by the South African National Research Foundation. Jess holds a PhD in Anthropology from Stanford University and an MSc in Forced Migration from Oxford. Her career trajectory has involved extended periods in academic institutions in Angola, Brazil, Mauritius and South Africa.
Email Jess.auerbach@uct.ac.za
Website jessauerbach.net
Twitter @jess_auerbach
LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jess-auerbach-64aa428/)
Rhodes Project: What is your favorite thing to do in Cape Town?
Jess Auerbach: Cape Town is a great city to observe how global systems function. There’s something powerful about being in a place where you can’t step away from the complexity of the current global order. There are a lot of things I enjoy about the city, but watching my student’s flourish counts a lot. Our program works with civil society activists from across the African continent and it’s inspiring and reassuring to observe the impact that the students make.
Rhodes Project: What book are you currently reading?
Jess Auerbach: Many! I’m writing one on fibre optic cables at the moment which is really absorbing.
Rhodes Project: What piece of technology could you not live without?
Jess Auerbach: I’m still going to go with paper and a pen.
Rhodes Project: What is your favorite childhood memory?
Jess Auerbach: The moment when my twin brother and I learned idioms at school, and we realized what a wild goose chase was, and the intellectual satisfaction that came with sending our four-year-old sister off on one, all around the small-holding where we lived. I still feel kind of bad about it, but it remains very funny. Luckily my sister has since forgiven us.
Rhodes Project: What surprised you most about your time at Oxford?
Jess Auerbach: I really wasn’t expecting the Rhodes community to be as powerful as it was. I went in with the attitude that Oxford would be an incredibly intellectually nourishing place, and that the Rhodes scholarship was just a means to experience the University. I found it to be completely the opposite. The Rhodes community really transformed so many aspects of myself and my intellectual development, and the degree was kind of by-the-by and not as satisfying as I had hoped. That was definitely a big surprise to me. It’s something I’ve taken into my teaching career as well – if students develop deep community they often do os much better academically.
Rhodes Project: What inspired you to pursue your PhD?
Jess Auerbach: I did a human rights law and policy degree when I was at Oxford, focused on forced migration. I got very frustrated with working purely at the policy level though, because so often the perspectives of the people most affected were not taken seriously. I decided that I wanted to go back and ask people what their own solutions to social justice issues were. I realized that I wanted the time to do empirical research in this way, and the U.S. PhD system in anthropology, particularly, allows for the kind of depth I wanted to get at.
Rhodes Project: Who is your favorite fictional heroine?
Jess Auerbach: One of the Wild Things in Where the Wild Things Are.
Rhodes Project: Who is your favorite real-life heroine?
Jess Auerbach: Graça Machel is someone who has been very inspiring for me throughout my life. I grew up being very conscious of the role she was playing first in the Mozambican struggle, and then in South Africa. And Queen Nzinga, who was this Angolan queen who played a very important role in resisting the Portuguese in the seventeenth century, is quite an inspiration too. I’ve been lucky to be mentored by a lot of wonderful women closer to home as well.
Rhodes Project: What do you do to relax?
Jess Auerbach: Family time is incredibly important to me at this point in life. I spend as much time as I can outside doing sport, and I play cello when I can. I make sure there’s space for human relationships, for good conversations with friends. I love reading fiction. I’m also really interested in woodwork, so when I can, I like to carve things.
Rhodes Project: What inspires you and why?
Jess Auerbach: I’m inspired by people who are committed to things which create a more interesting and more equitable world. Every time I meet somebody who is very focused and thoughtful about what they’re doing—whether it’s selling vegetables on the street in rural Angola or creating some crazy tech start-up in California or my students who are on the coalface of changing society.I find that very hope-inspiring and interesting. And of course the Rhodes community is full of those people, which is awesome.
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