Jess Abrahams

Born in South Africa but living in the UK since 1985, I am a part-time administrator for JAAG. I have worked in administration, mostly but not exclusively in education, for the last 35 years or so. My favourite job in administration was working for the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre at Lancaster University, a cross-departmental collaboration between the departments of Linguistics and Educational Research (which rejoiced for several happy years in being housed in a newly-created flagship Institute of Advanced Studies, leading less fortunate colleagues from our home departments to add "Institute of Less Advanced Studies" to their own departmental addresses). We ran a raft of longitudinal studies doing qualitative research into adult literacy and numeracy issues, supported by grants from a wide variety of funding bodies.

In 2013 I took a career break and came to live in the West Midlands to pursue a creative project. I have been here ever since, working freelance at a variety of part-time admin jobs at the same time as pursuing creative interests

Why I work for JAAG?

I am very conscious of how the insidious tentacles of information technology have infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives, and not always to our own benefit. I can remember the days before the invention of mobile phone and before computers were in common use, even in business, let alone in private use. While I am happy to use new technologies to the best of my ability to make my own life and work run more efficiently, I am aware of the vast amount of information processing, using data harvested from whatever we choose to engage in, which invisibly influences all sorts of outcomes, from the reasonably benign, to the downright detrimental. I am aware both of how much they intrude and also how intimidating they can be. I am pleased to be working with a group whose mission is to seek ways to improve this aspect of our human world.