Dr. Davis's work follows two broad and overlapping trajectories in social psychology and technology studies. She focuses on role-taking, status, stigma, and identity, along with technological affordances and the politics of digital design. 

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 ANU in 2017. 

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. The laboratory at ANU is the sole site of experimental methods in Australian Sociology (https://www.role-taking.com/). 

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 is Deputy Lead on ANU's Humanising Machine Intelligence (HMI) project. HMI is an interdisciplinary endeavor to integrate human values with AI/ML technologies (https://hmi.anu.edu.au/).

Her book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (MIT Press, 2020), shows how technologies reflect and shape human values, behaviors, and socio-structural arrangements (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-artifacts-afford). 

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