Profile

Jess is a Research Associate on the £1 million Wellcome Trust funded project, Reimagining Leadership. She is responsible for coordinating the project's Participatory Action Research methodology, which involves working with colleagues from the university's staff networks, trade unions, and other relevant committees.

She is a co-lead, along with Professor Natasha Mauthner, of the Methods Hub, an interdisciplinary initiative funded by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Institutes: the Institute for Social Science, the Humanities Research Institute and Institute for Creative Arts Practice.

She completed her PhD in the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at the University of East London in 2023. Jess's research uses a militant research methodology to understand contemporary notions of participation via an examination of her experience of participating in Corbynism and post-Corbynism. Themes addressed in her PhD include collective subjectivity, activist methodology, pedagogy, political strategy, and materiality. Her work draws on the immanent philosophical tradition and emancipatory political trajectories, including autonomous Marxism, feminism, and decoloniality.

Jess's academic background is in visual cultures, political science, international relations, and art history. She holds a MA with Distinction in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths College, and a First Class honours degree from Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Jess has a background working in higher education and with young people.

Jess is a coordinator of Feminise Politics Now! and in the past sat on the steering committee of the radical political education organisation, The World Transformed, was a Cumberland Lodge fellow between 2019 and 2021, and sat on the board of The Old Church, a community arts venue in Hackney, east London.

• Article

  • Adams J. The nomadic subject in student organising. Crossing Conceptual Boundaries 2022, 12(1), 5-20.

• Book Chapter

  • Adams, J, Lopes, A. Writing differently: consciousness-raising as academic activism. In: Gatto, M; Tracey, H, ed. How to be an academic activist. Edward Elgar, 2025. In Preparation.

• Online Publications

  • Adams, J. Militant research. Aspect Network, 2023. Available at: https://aspect.ac.uk/resources/militant-research/.
  • Adams J. Feminise Politics Now. Feminise Politics Now, 2023. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AemXx5dXmKzOK827GcttVr0F6xL3H7As/view.