Dr Jessamy Perriam

Dr Jessamy Perriam is an internationally recognised digital sociologist, researching the societal impacts of public sector digital transformation. She brings on the ground knowledge to the project through her time working at and alongside the UK’s Government Digital Service in the mid 2010s. From this experience, she is particularly interested in the methods used by the UK to share their best practices with governments worldwide. She is currently looking at the close knowledge sharing that happened between the UK and Australia when the Digital Transformation Agency was established. She is the co-editor of the edited collection Digitalisation in Practice (DeGruyter 2024) which looks at the impacts of public sector digital transformation initiatives from a range of international perspectives.

“The products of digital transformation have direct impacts on how we as citizens live our daily lives. We need to pay attention to who our governments choose to listen to and what they choose to implement. How and what governments choose to share or receive can deeply impact the livelihoods of those outside of our own backyards,”

Dr Perriam is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University and Associate Professor in Technologies in Practice at the IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark. She is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF) to research transnational knowledge sharing in public sector digital transformation.

Prior to joining the ANU, she worked at the Open University (UK) and was a nominated academic, working with the production team of BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed sociology program to identify new areas of research to highlight. She is keen to present a sociological viewpoint on current issues in the tech sector in a way that is easy for the public to understand.