Jessica Peng is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania pursuing a joint degree in Education and Anthropology, as well as a concentration in International Education Development. She has devoted most of her professional career working within the field of education in Indonesia. Her experiences include teaching as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant and Vassar Maguire Teaching Fellow at the secondary and post-secondary levels and, more recently, working as a research specialist for projects led by USAID, the Asian Development Bank, and Room to Read.

Jessica has broad research interests in the social production of difference, processes of social and geographic mobility, and the workings of educational reforms. Her current research examines Indonesia's efforts to become a top global economy, key to which is a focus on developing "skilled" youth labor forces across some of the most marginalized areas of the country. The multi-sited ethnography analyzes how the vocational training of young people have come to be viewed as an "infrastructural" prerequisite for national development and, more specifically, how efforts of national policymaking, public-private partnerships, and vocational schooling interlink to orient youth to pursue particular kinds of futures in the areas of education, labor, and migration. This work has been supported by the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Fulbright-Hays Program, and the American Institute for Indonesian Studies and Council of American Overseas Research Centers, among others.

Peng, Jessica H. (2021). "The Potentials of Fieldwork in a Pandemic: Navigating Shifting Landscapes of the Indonesian Fishery Industry." SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 36(2): 362-375.