Jenny L. Davis, PhD

Personal Webpage: jennyldavis.com

Research interests

social psychology, self and identity, status and stigma, cultural studies of the internet and emergent media, experimental research methods, qualitative research methods

Biography

Jenny Davis received her PhD in Sociology from Texas A&M University in 2012. Her work intersects technology studies and sociological social psychology. After 3 years as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at James Madison University (Virginia, USA), she joined The School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2017. Jenny was promoted to the rank of Senior Lecturer in 2019 and continued her work at ANU until 2024. In 2024, Jenny became a full professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University while maintaining an Honorary Professorship in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University.

Jenny is building a research program in collaboration with Dr. Tony Love to systematically study role-taking processes. The work  has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the American Sociological Association. In 2018, the project received an ANU Futures Scheme grant ($449,000) to design new measures and test interventions such as reading, writing, and virtual reality simulation.

Along with laboratory study, Jenny is interested in the real world implications of emergent technologies. She received an ARC DECRA grant in 2019 ($359,000) to study ethics in the Australian digital startup industry and she is part of the Humanizing Machine Intelligence (HMI) project at the ANU. HMI is an interdisciplinary endeavor to integrate human values with AI/ML technologies (https://hmi.anu.edu.au/).

She co-edits the Cyborgology Blog (https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/), a theoretical and interdisciplinary publication that fuses social theory and technology.

See Jenny’s book! How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things Available here.

Jenny is on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis (https://twitter.com/Jenny_L_Davis)