Jenny L Davis
Biographic Data
| ID | 3600488 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jenny L Davis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jenny L |
| FAMILY NAME | Davis |
| SIGNATURE | DAVIS J L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0952-5842 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 227 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The intended and unintended affordances of post-separation parenting apps
Little research has examined the role of specific technologies in relationships characterised by unequal power, such as those which underpin post-separation domestic and family violence. Drawing on the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances and the methods of feature analysis, this study analyses 32 post-separation parenting apps along with in-depth interviews with 18 Australian victim–survivors who used these platforms with a perpetr…
Repair and redress: A research program for algorithmic futures
Fairness initiatives have dominated efforts to reduce the social harms caused by algorithms in society. To date, those approaches have proven inadequate. We thus trouble the fairness paradigm, suggesting a reorientation towards repair and redress. We do so through concerted attention to and investigation of, algorithmic reparation . First introduced at the peak of algorithmic fairness, algorithmic reparation seeded an alternative that has since s…
AI’s Sociological Era
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a social structure cloaked in technical blackboxes and polarizing narratives. Sociology is the study of society from a structural perspective, delineating the interplays between individuals, organizations, institutions, and cultures. Sociology’s disciplinary lens is necessary to understand AI’s infrastructural force, reflecting and shaping politics, economies, knowledge, and interpersonal spheres. Yet to date, the …
How the Oak Tree Came to Be
1. nassapi’ shokhalanchapi’ (red oak tree)Those early anthropologistsgot it wrong—our traditional talesweren’t myths.They are prophesies.2. naksish filammi’ (branch)Do you knowthe stories about howCedar and Willowstarted out as humansand became trees?Even today theycontinue to carefor us and we treatthem as kin.3. nasi’ (acorn)Oak trees are greatcaregivers. Each acornis protected by a cupulethat acts as packed lunchcar seat and knitted blanketall…
Welcome to the Indigenous Languages Slipstream
Poem
Moral Entrepreneurs of the Mastodon Migration
Social media platforms are imbued with politics and values through an interplay of coded architectures, platform policies, economic models, and algorithmic curation, together shaping and shaped by the activities of users. This dynamic set of relations is most evident during moments of disruption, in which platform politics and values come under debate. We examine one such case of disruption through a mixed methods analysis of post-Musk Twitter, t…
The failure-speed ethos: Notes from a glocal startup scene
Technology startups are integral to local and global economies, with distinctive cultural logics that shape the nature of work in this sector and the technological developments generated therein.As an emergent market, Australian technology startups offer a window into global-local dynamics and a lens on the cultural forces at play.Based on three years of ethnographic research (2019-2022), I identify prevailing values that drive and animate both c…
Elevating humanism in high-stakes automation: Experts-in-the-loop and resort-to-force decision making
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies pervade myriad decision systems, mobilising data at a scale, speed, and scope that far exceed human capacities. Although it may be tempting to displace humans with these automated decision systems, doing so in high-stakes settings would be a mistake. Anchored by the example of states' resort to force, I argue that human expertise should be elevated—not relegated—within high-stakes decision contexts that i…
Role-taking and robotic form: An exploratory study of social connection in human-robot interaction
Who uses digital drugs? An international survey of ‘binaural beat’ consumers
Information technology & media sociology in a (still) pandemic world
The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issu…
Intersecting matters: GeorgeFloyd and #Covid19
In the late spring of 2020 amid a global pandemic, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota, triggering mass protests under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement. We take this moment of coinciding crises as our point of analysis observed through the lens of concurrent hashtags on Twitter. Social media content both reflect and construct the social meanings of topics and events. We thus draw from social media to understan…
The Stigma Discourse-Value Framework
Although stigma was first theorized as a basic social process, its contemporary developments have been highly compartmentalized. Understanding the nature of stigma—how it operates across subjects and circumstances—requires a return to general theory. The authors take this general turn, focusing on stigma’s discursive element. Through combined case studies of race, disability, and fat stigma (134 interviews with 146 parents), they develop the stig…
Facing Others’ Trauma: A Role-Taking Theory of Burnout
The experience of “burnout” is characterized by emotional fatigue and detachment associated with intensive stress. Burnout is prevalent across personal and professional spheres, with increasing cultural salience. Multiple factors can contribute to burnout. Here, we focus on one: exposure to others’ trauma. This circumstance spans domains from social service professions to social media newsfeeds, with potentially deleterious effects on the self. T…
Now more than ever: Citams's contributions to a pandemic society
Each year the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association curates a special issue highlighting sociological contributions to technology and media studies. That tradition continued in 2020, even as everything else changed. The articles included in this year’s special issue were mostly written pre-Pandemic, yet their implications seem amplified by the current historical moment. With …
Emotional consequences and attention rewards: The social effects of ratings on Reddit
Rating features on social media platforms affect visibility algorithms and act as symbolic markers of evaluation. This paper addresses the social effects of content ratings through a case study of Reddit. Reddit is a social news site on which users in topic-based communities (subreddits) create posts upon which others upvote, downvote, and comment. Vote scores indicate convergence with, and divergence from, community norms. Analysing data from th…
Racial Differences in Women’s Role-Taking Accuracy: How Status Matters
Role-taking is the process of mentally and affectively placing the self in the position of another, understanding the world from the other’s perspective. Role-taking serves an expressive function within interpersonal interaction, supporting others to pursue instrumental tasks that are recognized, valued, and rewarded. In the present work, we compare role-taking accuracy between white women and black women across status-varying interactional arran…
Algorithmic reparation
Machine learning algorithms pervade contemporary society. They are integral to social institutions, inform processes of governance, and animate the mundane technologies of daily life. Consistently, the outcomes of machine learning reflect, reproduce, and amplify structural inequalities. The field of fair machine learning has emerged in response, developing mathematical techniques that increase fairness based on anti-classification, classification…
How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things
A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective. Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things, offers a useful analytical tool in …
Attributions of ethical responsibility by Artificial Intelligence practitioners
Systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly normalized as part of work, leisure, and governance in contemporary societies. Although ethics in AI has received significant attention, it remains unclear where the burden of responsibility lies. Through twenty-one interviews with AI practitioners in Australia, this research seeks to understand how ethical attributions figure into the professional imagination. As institutionally embe…
Child feeding practices and concerns: Thematic content analysis of Thai virtual communities
Parents' child feeding practices are influenced not only by family but also by a broader circle of networks, including online groups. Peer-to-peer platforms such as Facebook groups facilitate a learning environment and may influence the transmission of user-generated content into practice. These digital data not only benefit participants but also offer new opportunities for researchers to study related phenomena. Therefore, this study employs the…
Good Neighbors and Supportive Grandfathers: Contextualizing Nonheritage Learners of Chickasaw
Dynamic Perspectives on Media and Information Technologies
This year’s Communication, Information Technologies and Media Sociology (CITAMS) special issue of Information, Communication & Society received a record number of submissions. While a large number
Collective Social Identity: Synthesizing Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory Using Digital Data
Identity theory (IT) and social identity theory (SIT) are eminent research programs from sociology and psychology, respectively. We test collective identity as a point of convergence between the two programs. Collective identity is a subtheory of SIT that pertains to activist identification. Collective identity maps closely onto identity theory’s group/social identity, which refers to identification with socially situated identity categories. We …
Soylent Is People, and Weird Is White: Biological Anthropology, Whiteness, and the Limits of the Weird
WEIRD populations, or those categorized as Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, are sampled in the majority of quantitative human subjects research. Although this oversampling is criticized in some corners of social science research, it is not always clear what we are critiquing. In this article, we make three interventions into the WEIRD concept and its common usage. First, we seek to better operationalize the terms within WE…
Soylent Is People, and Weird Is White: Biological Anthropology, Whiteness, and the Limits of the Weird
WEIRD populations, or those categorized as Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, are sampled in the majority of quantitative human subjects research. Although this oversampling is criticized in some corners of social science research, it is not always clear what we are critiquing. In this article, we make three interventions into the WEIRD concept and its common usage. First, we seek to better operationalize the terms within WE…
Seriously funny: The political work of humor on social media
Research shows a clear intersection between humor and political communication online as “big data” analyses demonstrate humorous content achieving disproportionate attention across social media platforms. What remains unclear is the degree to which politics are fodder for “silly” content production vis-à-vis humor as a serious political tool. To answer this question, we scraped Twitter data from two cases in which humor and politics converged dur…
Algorithmic reparation
Machine learning algorithms pervade contemporary society. They are integral to social institutions, inform processes of governance, and animate the mundane technologies of daily life. Consistently, the outcomes of machine learning reflect, reproduce, and amplify structural inequalities. The field of fair machine learning has emerged in response, developing mathematical techniques that increase fairness based on anti-classification, classification…
Collective Social Identity: Synthesizing Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory Using Digital Data
Identity theory (IT) and social identity theory (SIT) are eminent research programs from sociology and psychology, respectively. We test collective identity as a point of convergence between the two programs. Collective identity is a subtheory of SIT that pertains to activist identification. Collective identity maps closely onto identity theory’s group/social identity, which refers to identification with socially situated identity categories. We …
Discourse in Action: Parents' use of medical and social models to resist disability stigma
Language affiliation and ethnolinguistic identity in Chickasaw language revitalization
The Effect of Status on Role-Taking Accuracy
We conducted two experiments to test the effects of status on the relationship between gender and role-taking accuracy. Role-taking accuracy denotes the accuracy with which one can predict another's behavior. In Study 1, we examine self-evaluative measures of role-taking accuracy and find they do not correlate with actual role-taking accuracy. In addition, women were more accurate role-takers than men, regardless of interaction history. In Study …
Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era
The increasing prevalence of digital social technologies in everyday life affects processes of self and identity in theoretically and empirically interesting ways. Based on face-to-face interviews (N = 17) and synchronous text-based exchanges (N = 32) from a Facebook-based population, I examine the conditions of identity negotiation in a networked era, and explore how social actors strike a presentational balance between ideal and authentic. I id…
Generalizing from social media data: A Formal Theory Approach
Researchers increasingly draw on social media data to answer big questions about social patterns and dynamics. However, as with any data source, social media data present both opportunities and significant challenges. One major critique of social media data is that the data are not generalizable outside of the platforms from which the data originate. Problems of generalizability stem from non-universal participation rates on various platforms, de…
Distribution and disavowal: Managing the parental stigma of Children's weight and weight loss
Architecture of the personal interactive homepage: Constructing the self through MySpace
From a symbolic interactionist perspective, this work looks at the construction of self and identity through MySpace. Using ethnographic methods, I look to answer two questions: (1) how does the physical architecture of the personal interactive homepage (PIH) facilitate interaction and self presentation in particular ways? (2) How does self presentation through the PIH impact processes of negotiated self construction more largely? I discuss three…
Narrative Construction of a Ruptured Self: Stories of Transability on Transabled.org
Transabled.org is an online community for people with body integrity identity disorder (BIID). People with BIID believe that they were born in incorrectly abled bodies. By analyzing the Introduction statements of twenty-two bloggers, the author shows how BIID is collectively constructed and individually articulated. Specifically, the author shows how bloggers essentialize their impairment-needs, painting a picture of a ruptured self. Through self…
Prosuming Identity: The Production and Consumption of Transableism on Transabled.org
Prosumption refers to the blurring of production and consumption. Although this has always been present (Ritzer, 2009), the contemporary era creates an environment in which prosumption can flourish. Specifically, the presence of Web 2.0 has led to an abundance of user-generated content, produced by those who consume it. I wish to argue here for an extension of the theoretical idea of prosumption into the arena of identity. Currently, prosumption …
Elevating humanism in high-stakes automation: Experts-in-the-loop and resort-to-force decision making
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies pervade myriad decision systems, mobilising data at a scale, speed, and scope that far exceed human capacities. Although it may be tempting to displace humans with these automated decision systems, doing so in high-stakes settings would be a mistake. Anchored by the example of states' resort to force, I argue that human expertise should be elevated—not relegated—within high-stakes decision contexts that i…
Women Who Stay: A Morality Work Perspective
Women who choose to stay in abusive relationships occupy a morally ambiguous identity category. They are at once pitied for their victimhood and shamed for their participation in it. We examine debates over women who stay using the highly publicized case of Janay Rice, who actively defended her professional football player husband, Ray Rice, following the release of a video in which he knocked her unconscious. Specifically, we engage in sentiment…
Morality Work among the Transabled
In the present article, I address the process of moral stigma resistance using an accounts studies framework. Specifically, I delineate and illustrate the concept of morality work. I demonstrate morality work empirically through a qualitative analysis of 17 years (1994–2011) of blog posts, archived content, and links to and from Transabled.org. Transabled.org is a website, blog, support group, and interaction forum for people with body integrity …
Racial Differences in Women’s Role-Taking Accuracy: How Status Matters
Role-taking is the process of mentally and affectively placing the self in the position of another, understanding the world from the other’s perspective. Role-taking serves an expressive function within interpersonal interaction, supporting others to pursue instrumental tasks that are recognized, valued, and rewarded. In the present work, we compare role-taking accuracy between white women and black women across status-varying interactional arran…
Discursive Entwinement: How White Transracially Adoptive Parents Navigate Race
Through 47 interviews with 56 White parents who attend culture camps, the authors analyze race discourse and practices in transracially adoptive families. The authors document parents' use of two discursive frames, colorblindness and race consciousness, and find that small subsamples of parents use either race consciousness or colorblindness exclusively, while the majority (66 percent) entwine the two discursive frames together. Because the sampl…
Facing Others’ Trauma: A Role-Taking Theory of Burnout
The experience of “burnout” is characterized by emotional fatigue and detachment associated with intensive stress. Burnout is prevalent across personal and professional spheres, with increasing cultural salience. Multiple factors can contribute to burnout. Here, we focus on one: exposure to others’ trauma. This circumstance spans domains from social service professions to social media newsfeeds, with potentially deleterious effects on the self. T…
Good Neighbors and Supportive Grandfathers: Contextualizing Nonheritage Learners of Chickasaw
Architecture of the personal interactive homepage: Constructing the self through MySpace
From a symbolic interactionist perspective, this work looks at the construction of self and identity through MySpace. Using ethnographic methods, I look to answer two questions: (1) how does the physical architecture of the personal interactive homepage (PIH) facilitate interaction and self presentation in particular ways? (2) How does self presentation through the PIH impact processes of negotiated self construction more largely? I discuss three…
Narrative Construction of a Ruptured Self: Stories of Transability on Transabled.org
Transabled.org is an online community for people with body integrity identity disorder (BIID). People with BIID believe that they were born in incorrectly abled bodies. By analyzing the Introduction statements of twenty-two bloggers, the author shows how BIID is collectively constructed and individually articulated. Specifically, the author shows how bloggers essentialize their impairment-needs, painting a picture of a ruptured self. Through self…
Prosuming Identity: The Production and Consumption of Transableism on Transabled.org
Prosumption refers to the blurring of production and consumption. Although this has always been present (Ritzer, 2009), the contemporary era creates an environment in which prosumption can flourish. Specifically, the presence of Web 2.0 has led to an abundance of user-generated content, produced by those who consume it. I wish to argue here for an extension of the theoretical idea of prosumption into the arena of identity. Currently, prosumption …
The Effect of Status on Role-Taking Accuracy
We conducted two experiments to test the effects of status on the relationship between gender and role-taking accuracy. Role-taking accuracy denotes the accuracy with which one can predict another's behavior. In Study 1, we examine self-evaluative measures of role-taking accuracy and find they do not correlate with actual role-taking accuracy. In addition, women were more accurate role-takers than men, regardless of interaction history. In Study …
Morality Work among the Transabled
In the present article, I address the process of moral stigma resistance using an accounts studies framework. Specifically, I delineate and illustrate the concept of morality work. I demonstrate morality work empirically through a qualitative analysis of 17 years (1994–2011) of blog posts, archived content, and links to and from Transabled.org. Transabled.org is a website, blog, support group, and interaction forum for people with body integrity …
Triangulating the Self: Identity Processes in a Connected Era
The increasing prevalence of digital social technologies in everyday life affects processes of self and identity in theoretically and empirically interesting ways. Based on face-to-face interviews (N = 17) and synchronous text-based exchanges (N = 32) from a Facebook-based population, I examine the conditions of identity negotiation in a networked era, and explore how social actors strike a presentational balance between ideal and authentic. I id…
Motherhood and associative moral stigma: The moral double bind
Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse
As a concept, affordance is integral to scholarly analysis across multiple fields—including media studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, ecological psychology, and design studies among others. Critics, however, rightly point to the following shortcomings: definitional confusion, a false binary in which artifacts either afford or do not, and failure to account for diverse subject-artifact relations. Addressing these critiq…
Language affiliation and ethnolinguistic identity in Chickasaw language revitalization
Curation: A theoretical treatment
Curation is a key mechanism of sociality in a digital era. With an abundance of information, sifting, sorting, selecting, hiding, and standing out become laborious tasks. While researchers have diligently documented people’s curatorial strategies, digital curation remains undertheorized in its own right. I therefore theorize digital curation by disentangling productive curation from consumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that …
Discourse in Action: Parents' use of medical and social models to resist disability stigma
Discursive Entwinement: How White Transracially Adoptive Parents Navigate Race
Through 47 interviews with 56 White parents who attend culture camps, the authors analyze race discourse and practices in transracially adoptive families. The authors document parents' use of two discursive frames, colorblindness and race consciousness, and find that small subsamples of parents use either race consciousness or colorblindness exclusively, while the majority (66 percent) entwine the two discursive frames together. Because the sampl…
The Effect of Status on Identity Stability
Using 77 status-imbalanced dyads, we experimentally test the effect of status on identity stability, setting the stage for research on identity change. From an identity theory perspective, we hypothesize that those with higher status will maintain greater identity stability over the course of a task-oriented interaction than their relatively lower status partners. We further test the role of identity-discrepant information. Results indicate that …
Citams as a transfield: Introduction to the special issue
A decade ago, in June 2008,Information, Communication & Society published the first special issue of CITASA: the Communication and Information Technology section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Then, as now, it consisted of articles based on papers presented at the previous year’s annual meeting of the ASA. The basic principle was to obtain (sometimes revised) papers soon after the ASA meeting, referee them rigorously, and get the…
Talking Indian: Identity and Language Revitalization in the Chickasaw Renaissance
A valuable look at how Native language programs contribute to broader community-building efforts...Provided by publisher
Seriously funny: The political work of humor on social media
Research shows a clear intersection between humor and political communication online as “big data” analyses demonstrate humorous content achieving disproportionate attention across social media platforms. What remains unclear is the degree to which politics are fodder for “silly” content production vis-à-vis humor as a serious political tool. To answer this question, we scraped Twitter data from two cases in which humor and politics converged dur…
Generalizing from social media data: A Formal Theory Approach
Researchers increasingly draw on social media data to answer big questions about social patterns and dynamics. However, as with any data source, social media data present both opportunities and significant challenges. One major critique of social media data is that the data are not generalizable outside of the platforms from which the data originate. Problems of generalizability stem from non-universal participation rates on various platforms, de…
Distribution and disavowal: Managing the parental stigma of Children's weight and weight loss
Women Who Stay: A Morality Work Perspective
Women who choose to stay in abusive relationships occupy a morally ambiguous identity category. They are at once pitied for their victimhood and shamed for their participation in it. We examine debates over women who stay using the highly publicized case of Janay Rice, who actively defended her professional football player husband, Ray Rice, following the release of a video in which he knocked her unconscious. Specifically, we engage in sentiment…
Dynamic Perspectives on Media and Information Technologies
This year’s Communication, Information Technologies and Media Sociology (CITAMS) special issue of Information, Communication & Society received a record number of submissions. While a large number
Collective Social Identity: Synthesizing Identity Theory and Social Identity Theory Using Digital Data
Identity theory (IT) and social identity theory (SIT) are eminent research programs from sociology and psychology, respectively. We test collective identity as a point of convergence between the two programs. Collective identity is a subtheory of SIT that pertains to activist identification. Collective identity maps closely onto identity theory’s group/social identity, which refers to identification with socially situated identity categories. We …
Soylent Is People, and Weird Is White: Biological Anthropology, Whiteness, and the Limits of the Weird
WEIRD populations, or those categorized as Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic, are sampled in the majority of quantitative human subjects research. Although this oversampling is criticized in some corners of social science research, it is not always clear what we are critiquing. In this article, we make three interventions into the WEIRD concept and its common usage. First, we seek to better operationalize the terms within WE…
How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things
A conceptual update of affordance theory that introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework, providing a vocabulary and critical perspective. Technological affordances mediate between the features of a technology and the outcomes of engagement with that technology. The concept of affordances, which migrated from psychology to design with Donald Norman's influential 1988 book, The Design of Everyday Things, offers a useful analytical tool in …
Attributions of ethical responsibility by Artificial Intelligence practitioners
Systems based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) are increasingly normalized as part of work, leisure, and governance in contemporary societies. Although ethics in AI has received significant attention, it remains unclear where the burden of responsibility lies. Through twenty-one interviews with AI practitioners in Australia, this research seeks to understand how ethical attributions figure into the professional imagination. As institutionally embe…
Child feeding practices and concerns: Thematic content analysis of Thai virtual communities
Parents' child feeding practices are influenced not only by family but also by a broader circle of networks, including online groups. Peer-to-peer platforms such as Facebook groups facilitate a learning environment and may influence the transmission of user-generated content into practice. These digital data not only benefit participants but also offer new opportunities for researchers to study related phenomena. Therefore, this study employs the…
Sociology (30 works) · Psychology (24 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Political science (15 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Epistemology (7 works)