About

Co Directors

Apryl Williams

Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan

Apryl Williams (@aprylw) is Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Studies at the University of Michigan. She is also a Senior Fellow in Trustworthy AI at the Mozilla Foundation, a Faculty Associate at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and an affiliated researcher at NYU’s Center for Critical Race & Digital Studies. Williams studies digital media and algorithmic technologies as they converge with issues concerning race / ethnicity, gender, collective identities, and popular culture. Her work on racialized experiences with social media and bias in technology has been published in leading interdisciplinary journals including Social Media + Society and the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Williams’ research has also been covered in popular press outlets including Time Magazine, Wired, Mic.com, Newsweek, Slate, NPR’s On the Media, The Guardian, and BuzzfeedNews.

Jenny Davis

Sociologist, Australian National University

Jenny L. Davis (@Jenny_L_Davis) is a sociologist at the Australian National University. Her research intersects social psychology and technology studies, with a particular focus on identifying and reducing inequality as it materializes in technological systems. She is the Deputy Lead for ANU’s Humanising Machine Intelligence Project and Chair of the Communication, Information Technologies, & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association. She holds an ARC DECRA Fellowship leading a project on ethics in Australia’s technology start-up sector and is the founder and Lead of ANU’s Role-Taking Lab, established through a Futures Scheme grant. Her work is published in flagship journals from sociology, social psychology, and new media studies and her book, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (2020), is out with MIT Press.