Jessica Ott is an anthropologist and policy fellow whose research and publications have focused on gender, civil society, human rights, health equity, domestic work, and Islam. She has extensive research experience in Zanzibar and has also studied and worked for several years in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Dr. Ott most recently completed a Science & Technology Policy Fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, during which she worked as a Human Rights Policy/Research Fellow in the State Department’s human rights bureau and as a Center for Global Health Studies Research Fellow at the NIH. Prior to that, she worked as an international health systems research scientist, specializing in gender and qualitative methods, at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
Gender-Based Violence/Domestic Violence /GBV
LGBTQ
Healthcare Access/Health Systems Capacity
Government/State Actor Persecution
HIV/AIDS
Journalist Persecution
Ethnic Discrimination Or Persecution
Religious Discrimination Or Persecution
Political Persecution
Prison Conditions
Forced Marriage
Freedom of Expression. Association and Peaceful Assembly
Forced Labor
I was heavily involved in drafting the State Department's 2024 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, which cover refugee and asylum issues and are often used in refugee and asylum cases.
Ott, J. (2024). “You Don’t Need Money to Give Alms”: The Protective Capacity of Faith and Spiritual Kinship Among Domestic Workers in Zanzibar. Anthropology of Work Review 45(2): 69-78. https://doi.org/10.1111/awr.12274
Ott, J. (2022). Umoja: A Swahili feminist ethic for negotiating justice in Zanzibar. Feminist Anthropology 3:389-403. https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12080
Ott, J. (2021). “Anything That Departs from Justice to Injustice Is Not Part of the Shari’a”: Women’s Rights Activism and Islamic Legal Reform in Zanzibar. In E. Cloete, M. Ndakalako-Bannikov, & M. C. Stember (Eds.), African Women and Their Networks of Support: Intervening Connections (pp. 43–66). Lexington Books.
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