The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is now accepting fellowship applications for the 2022-2023 academic year through their open call.
Donor Name: Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University
State: Massachusetts
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Fellowship
Deadline (mm/dd/yyyy): 01/31/2022
Details:
The Berkman Klein Center’s fellowship program provides an opportunity for innovative thinkers and changemakers to come together to hone and share ideas, find camaraderie, and spawn new initiatives. The program encourages and supports fellows in an inviting and playful intellectual environment with community activities designed to foster inquiry and risk-taking; to identify and expose common threads across fellows’ individual activities; and to bring fellows into conversation with the students, staff, faculty, and broader community at the Berkman Klein Center. From their diverse backgrounds and wide-ranging physical and virtual travels, Berkman Klein Center fellows bring fresh ideas, skills, passion, and connections to the Center and their community, and from their time spent in Cambridge, they help build and extend new perspectives and activities back out into their home networks, communities, and fields. Fellows appointed through this open call come into their fellowship with a personal research agenda, a set of ambitions, and a sense of the public scholarship and community interactions they wish to foster while at the Center.
Areas of Interest for 2022-2023:
They invite applications from scholars whose research advances Internet & society studies in the public interest. For the 2022-2023 year, a couple of the topics they would be interested in having fellows explore include:
- Regulating and Implementing Ethical AI
- How should governmental, nonprofit, and private sector organizations implement AI best practices and turn AI principles into operational realities? How might they reconcile notions of rights or harms in legal and regulatory settings with ways in which AIs are trained and formalized? How might they check if an AI system is doing what they want, whether it’s ex-ante or ex-post, whether it’s using explanations, transparency, metrics, or creating some other validation tools?
- Adapting Copyright Law to Support Teaching in a Pandemic and Post-Pandemic Environment
- How copyright law should be shaped amidst technological and social change remains a significant question. For example, some pandemic pedagogic initiatives arguably violated the copyright laws of various nations – even as they had positive impact for those learning and perhaps little effect on existing markets for copyrighted works. BKC is interested in work that examines the ways in which copyright law and other dimensions of the legal system could be interpreted or reformed to enable the preservation and further extension of fair use broadly and of the benign pedagogic innovations provoked by the pandemic.
- Designing for Equitable Learning
- One-size-fits-all educational systems fit few learners well and differentially misserve the already underserved. COVID-19’s disruption to student learning has heightened and exacerbated inequalities across many dimensions in ways both expected and unanticipated. BKC invites scholars and practitioners whose work considers: a) how social, policy, or technological interventions can support equitable, high-quality learning environments; b) how they can ethically govern educational, behavioral, and personal student data and ensure data is used to benefit and harm students; and c) how sociotechnical systems can work for learners as individuals by taking into consideration their locality, social environment, identity, interests, and learning trajectory.
Eligibility Criteria
They invite applications from people whose work on Internet and society may overlap with ongoing work at the Berkman Klein Center and may expose their community to new opportunities and approaches. They welcome applications from people who feel that a year as a fellow in their variegated community would accelerate their efforts and contribute to their ongoing personal and professional development.
They encourage applications from scholars, practitioners, innovators, engineers, artists, and others committed to understanding and advancing the public interest. Fellows come from across the disciplinary spectrum and different life paths.
- Some fellows are academics. For the 2022-2023 year, they invite academics who are post-docs or professors. Please note that in the 2022-2023 academic year they are not welcoming students into their fellowship cohort. (They will spend the year focused on supporting Harvard students through other types of programming, and may solicit applications from students from other institutions through other efforts, such as their research sprints.)
- Some fellows are practitioners who have built their careers outside of academia, including technologists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, policymakers, activists, journalists, educators, and others from various sectors and callings.
- Many fellows wear multiple hats and straddle different pursuits at the intersections of their capacities. Fellows might be starting, rebooting, driving forward in, questioning, or pivoting from their established careers.
- For the 2022-2023 year, they will prioritize and select for fellows who have a demonstrated record of contributing to public and scholarly conversations in their area of study.
- Fellows are committed to spending their fellowship in concert with others, guided by a heap of kindness, a critical eye, and generosity of spirit.
For more information, visit Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
