Jenny L. Davis

Timeline

1. 2017–2018

   Joining ANU sociology

   With a PhD in sociology from Texas A&M University and three years as an assistant professor of sociology at James Madison University, she joins the ANU School of Sociology in 2017. In February 2018, she receives $450,000 from the ANU Futures scheme for a four-year experimental project on identity, status and group processes that uses virtual reality to study role-taking.

2. December 2018

   A DECRA on design ethics

   In December 2018, she wins an Australian Research Council DECRA grant for a three-year project on social factors in digital design, including an ethnographic study of software and hardware engineers, coders, entrepreneurs and end-users. The project, The social dynamics of digital design: building an ethics-based industry, aims to cultivate socially responsible design practices within Australia's digital start-up industry.

3. August 2020

   How Artifacts Afford at MIT Press

   A senior lecturer at ANU, she publishes her first book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things, with MIT Press in August 2020. The book asks how objects afford, for whom and under what circumstances, and presents an operational framework for analysing and designing technologies in society.

4. 2021

   The algorithmic reparation paper

   In 2021, she publishes “Algorithmic reparation” in Big Data & Society with Apryl Williams and Michael W. Yang. The paper argues that fair machine learning methods fall short of addressing systemic, intersectional inequality and proposes reparative algorithms that name, unmask and undo allocative and representational harms.

5. April 2022

   An ICLR keynote on affordances

   In April 2022, she gives the keynote “‘Affordances’ for Machine Learning” at the International Conference on Learning Representations, applying her mechanisms and conditions framework to ML systems. She is then a Chief Investigator and Deputy Lead on ANU's Humanising Machine Intelligence project and chair of the American Sociological Association's CITAMS section.

6. March 2024

   Vanderbilt professor and CDT fellow

   In March 2024, the Center for Democracy and Technology names her, a professor of sociology in Vanderbilt University's College of Arts and Science, to its 2024–26 class of nonresident fellows. At Vanderbilt, she joins the steering committee of the Grand Challenge Initiative in AI and teaches a class on AI in social systems.

7. November 2024–June 2026

   The Injustice of Fairness

   In a November 2024 essay for the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, she presents algorithmic reparation as a framework of redress for algorithmic bias. UC Press publishes The Injustice of Fairness: Algorithmic Reparation and the Case for Redress, her book with Apryl A. Williams, in June 2026.

8. As of October 2026

   Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair

   She is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair and Professor of Sociology at Vanderbilt University, with a secondary appointment in the College of Connected Computing, and an Honorary Professor of Sociology at ANU. She directs the Sociology of AI Lab and is founding co-director of Computing + Society, and her research follows how social forces embed in technological systems, with particular attention to AI and its infrastructures.