Summer Research Assistant – Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society

Are you passionate about communications? The BKC communications team is seeking one or more creative, highly motivated candidates to work on a range of writing, project management, and digital media tasks that help tell the Berkman Klein story to the public and target audiences. You may be asked to help with any aspect of BKC’s communications activities, including writing and editing website and social media content, liaising with project teams, promoting events, brainstorming approaches to storytelling, and developing creative ways to share and amplify research, education, programs, and other activities of the Center. The right candidate will be someone who is an outstanding and efficient writer; is sharp, flexible, and reliable; has great organizational skills to juggle multiple tasks, people, and projects; is a strong collaborator with the EQ to work well with varying personalities and work styles; understands both traditional and social media. Come join us for the summer!

Over the last few years BKC has launched new educational initiatives including the Research Sprint and the Summer Institute. These formats support early-career scholars from around the world to engage with broader academic and professional networks, apply their existing expertise to new problems, and learn new approaches to research, policy, and academic work.  The RA(s) in this position will be working closely with Program Managers and the Center’s Managing Director to scope and plan a fall research sprint related to digital identity and other educational initiatives at the Berkman Klein Center.

The Executive Director and Managing Director of BKC are looking to hire entrepreneurial research assistants to support their leadership of the Center and the Center’s engagement on a broad range of initiatives relating to the rapidly evolving relationship between the Internet, technology and society. Ideal candidates will demonstrate intellectual curiosity, versatility, the ability to quickly develop expertise in unfamiliar subjects, wide-ranging interests, excellent verbal and writing skills, and the desire to influence public policy and interdisciplinary dialogue on next-generation issues involving technology. The RAs would assist on a range of projects and programmatic activities in furtherance of the mission of the Center. The specific topics and activities will evolve over time but are likely to include research, analysis and programmatic activities on the intersection of Internet freedom; post-COVID educational innovation at Harvard and beyond; technology & human rights; responsible business practices in the technology sector; societal implications of AI models increasingly capable of imitating human interaction; and other evolving issues at the intersection of law, policy, and technology.

Lumen’s Summer Project RAs will primarily be responsible for manually reviewing documents in the Lumen database that require redaction prior to being attached to notices, because they may contain sensitive material such as personally identifying information or allegedly defamatory content.
Beyond these ongoing redaction duties, and depending on interest and skills, Lumen RAs may also be asked to assist with other aspects of Lumen’ activities, including:
- Working within the Lumen database to facilitate research agendas.
- Creating or editing material for the Lumen website.
- Writing blog entries for the website discussing current events as they relate to online expression, and assessing the climate for Internet speech. These provide a good chance to post your work online quickly. These posts can be on topics of your choosing, or on suggestions from Lumen staff.
- Helping (when schedule permits) with Lumen online events.
Additionally, Lumen will hire a Summer Research RA to work directly with Lumen Research Fellow Shreya Tewari in the following ways:
- Assisting with the development of Lumen Research Fellow’s research paper.
- Reviewing existing literature (such as research papers, articles, policy briefs and legislations among other material), and preparing short summary of findings on material thematically related to copyright and content takedown.
- Assisting Research Fellow with conducting research in the Lumen database to build on the existing corpus of ‘false/fraudulent’ copyright takedown notices.
- Participating in conversations with other stakeholders including OSPs, academics and researchers and learning from their experiences with content takedown to continue evolving the research and research methodology.
Please specify whether you’re applying for the Project RA position or the Research RA position in your cover letter.

We are a group of law students, teachers, practitioners, and academic researchers affiliated with BKC interested in helping empower people to solve the issues facing their communities by building upon an approach we have had success with in law school classrooms. The approach makes use of a pseudonymous chat platform called Threads and takes its inspiration from the ideal form of jury. An ideal jury is an empowered body of people from diverse backgrounds who come together as equals to apply and explain their different perspectives in collectively determining the just outcome to an issue of communal concern. We are currently working with a school district in Pittsburgh to adapt our methods to their classrooms. Research Assistants on the project will be responsible for conducting research into related teaching practices, preparing materials to inform others about our project, and helping to consider and develop new avenues for our methods at schools and beyond.