Curriculum Vitae

Ethan Zuckerman

ethanz@umass.edu  |  ethanzuckerman.com

Education

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY.
Work towards MFA in Electronic Arts, 1994-5. Withdrew to pursue professional interests.

University of Ghana, Legon, Ghana.
Studied Ethnomusicology under a Fulbright fellowship, 1993-4.

Williams College, Williamstown, MA
B.A., Philosophy (cum laude) 1993

Academic Experience

University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (2021- )
Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication and Information

Columbia University, New York, NY (2020-2021)
Visiting Scholar, Knight First Amendment Institute

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (2009, 2011-2020)
Associate Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences,
MIT Media Lab, 2016 – August 2020
Joint appointment to Comparative Media Studies and Writing, 2017 – August 2020
Principal Research Scientist, MIT Media Lab, 2011 – 2016
Visiting Scientist, MIT Media Lab, 2011
Research Fellow, MIT Media Lab, 2009

Harvard University, Cambridge MA (2003-2011)
Senior Researcher, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, 2005-2011
Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, 2003-2005

Williams College, Williamstown MA (2001)
Visiting Lecturer, winter 2001

Non-Academic Experience

Open Society Foundations, New York, NY
Special Advisor to the President, 2017-present

Ford Foundation, New York, NY
Advisor to the President, 2014-2018

Global Voices, Haarlem, The Netherlands
Co-founder, Executive Director, 2006-2008

Geekcorps, North Adams, MA
Co-founder, Executive Director, 1999-2004

Tripod, Inc. Williamstown, MA
VP, R&D and founding team member, 1994-1999

Honors and Awards

Research Funding Received

Bibliography and Products of Scholarship

Books:

Papers in Refereed Journals:

Papers in Refereed Conference Proceedings:

Book Chapters:

White papers, working papers and briefings:

Popular press:

Projects

Social change projects:

Journalism projects:

Technology projects:

Editorial projects:

Symposia and Events organized

Exploring Media Ecosystems, MIT Media Lab (2018, 2020) – two day conference on interdisciplinary, mixed-method approaches to understanding the spread of ideas in digital media, featuring 40+ scholars from around the world..

Forbidden Research, MIT Media Lab (2016) – two-day conference on questions of what is allowable as academic and scholarly research, organized with Joi Ito, Jess Sousa and Lorrie LeJeune for 200+ members of the MIT Media Lab community

Freedom to Innovate, MIT Media Lab (2015) – two day conference organized with EFF on legal threats to academic innovation in technology and possible academic responses.

Knight Civic Media annual conference, MIT Media Lab (2011 – 2014) – three-day conference of leading civic media practitioners, organized annually for 200+ participants for four years.

DDoS and Human Rights Summit, Berkman Center, Harvard Law School (2010) – meeting between leading international independent media and human rights organizations and DDoS mitigation providers to discuss denial of service attacks used to silence online speech.

Circumvention Summit, Berkman Center, Harvard Law School (2009) – meeting of leading internet censorship software authors to discuss efficacy and vulnerability of their tools, strategy for cooperation.

Global Voices Civic Media Summit (2005, 2007, 2009) – held biannually in London, New Delhi, Budapest, bringing together leading thinkers on citizen and participatory media in the developing world.

Teaching Experience

Taught at MIT

Taught at Harvard Law School

Taught at Williams College

Academic and other presentations

I give 20-30 talks per year – notable talks below:

• March 2020 “The Trouble With Civic Media”, UT Austin Communications, Austin, TX
• March 2020 “Practical Steps Towards a Less Awful Internet”, TTI Vanguard, Seattle, WA
• March 2020 “QAnon, Epistemic Fracture and the Study of Post Truth Media”, Mapping Media Ecosystems, MIT, Cambridge MA
• February 2020 “The Trouble With Civic Media”, Cornell Communications, Ithaca, MY
• January 2020 “The Trouble With Civic Media”, ILC Communications Hub, UMass Amherst, Amherst MA.
• November 2019 – “Can We Make Social Media Good for Society?”, Seoul Digital Forum, Seoul, South Korea.
• October 2019 – “Are Social Networks Bad for Society?”, Medias et Seine, Paris, France.
• September 2019 – “Normalizing vs. Watchdogging in a Nativist Age”, Online News Association, New Orleans, LA
• July 2019 – “Understanding Media Ecosystems”, Scuola Normale Superiori, IHSS, Florence, Italy.
• May 2019 – “Beyond the Vast Wasteland”, Aspen Institute, educational briefing for Congresspeople, MIT, Cambridge, MA.
• May 2019 – “QAnon and the Unreal”, Media in Transition 9, MIT, Cambridge, MA.
• December 2018 – “We Make the Media”, Future of Speech Online, Newseum, Washington, DC.
• October 2018 – “Making Change with Civic Media”, opening keynote, g0v Summit, Taipei, Taiwan.
• Septenber 2018 – “How to Avoid Destroying the World”, closing plenary, EmTech, MIT, Cambridge, MA.
• August 2018 – “Civic Media and Civic Entertainment”, master class, India Cultural Lab, Mumbai, India.
• May 2018 – “Two Bens and a Mark”, Media Impact Forum, Philadelphia, PA.
• October 2017 – “The Future is WEIRD”, Long Now Foundation, Boston, MA.
• May 2017 – “Can Media Make Change?”, Forum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX.
• April 2017 – “A World Turned Upside Down”, Personal Democracy Forum CEE, Posnan, Poland (via video).
• December 2016 – “It’s Journalism’s Job to Save Civics”, keynote, Constructive Journalism Summit, Windesheim University, Windesheim, The Netherlands.
• November 2016 – keynote at Premio Nacional de Periodismo Simón Bolívar, Bogota, Columbia.
• May 2016 – “What Comes After a Revolution”, Campus Party, Utrecht, The Netherlands.
• April 2016 – “Civic Revolutions”, Applied Brilliance, Havana, Cuba.
• March 2016 – “Government Mistrust and Civic Participation”, televised (CSPAN) address at Rice University, Houston, TX.
• October 2015 – “Insurrectionist Civics and Digital Activism”, Syracuse Symposium, Syracuse, NY.
• May 2015 – “The System is Broken, and That’s the Good News”, opening keynote, Re:publica, Berlin.
• March 2015 – “Mistrust as a Civic Asset”, closing keynote, TICTeC conference, MySociety, London, UK.
• December 2014 – “Digital Cosmopolitans”, Google Talk, Cambridge, MA.
• November 2014 – “Civic Media Revolutions”, opening keynote, ITForum/Black Hat, São Paulo, Brazil.
• November 2014 – “Normalizing Surveillance”, Tow Center, Columbia Journalism School, NYC.
• September 2014 – “Screwing Up by Not Questioning Assumptions”, BIF10, Providence, RI
• September 2014 – “Bibliolarceny and the Size of the Universe”, commencement lecture, Williams College
• May 2014 – “Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection”, Zocalo Public Square Book Prize Address, Los Angeles
• February 2014 – “Civic Media, Civic Change”, keynote, East West Center Media Conference, Yangon, Myanmar
• November 2013 – “New Media, New Civics?”, Bellwether Lecture, Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford, UK
• September 2013 – “In Defense of Advocacy Journalism”, Nieman Fellowship 75th Anniversary, Cambridge, MA
• July 2013 – “The Internet is Not Flat”, Ontario Library Association, Toronto, ON
• June 2013 – “Why Our Webs Are Rarely Worldwide”, Personal Democracy Forum, New York City
• May 2013 – “Beyond the Crisis in Civics”, opening keynote, Digital Media and Learning, Chicago, IL
• May 2013 – “Localizing the Parody Remix” Media In Transition 8, Cambridge, MA
• August 2012 – “The Emergence of Digital Civics” Flinders University, Adelaide, Australia
• August 2012 – James Tizard Memorial Lecture, Adelaide, Australia
• October 2011 – “Cute Cats and the Arab Spring: When Social Media Meet Social Change”, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC.
• May 2011 – “Desperately Seeking Serendipity”, closing keynote, ACM SIGCHI 2011
• June 2010 – “It’s a Big World After All”, TED Global, Oxford UK
• March 2008 – “The Cute Cat Theory”, O’Reilly Emerging Technology, San Francisco, CA
• October 2004 – “Geekcorps – a Digital Peace Corps”, Pop!Tech, Camden, ME

Service

University committees

Outside service

I currently serve on the advisory boards of Center for Democracy and Technology, Code for America, Data & Society, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Global Giving, Tarbell and the Wikimedia Foundation.

Students Supervised

Doctoral Theses, Advisor:

• Nathan Matias (2017) Governing Human and Machine Behavior in an Experimenting Society
• Erhardt Graeff (2018) Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment
• Jia Zhang (2018) The Constant Atlas: Mapping Public Data for Individuals and Their Cities
• Laura Perovich (2020 – projected)
• Alexis Hope (2021 – projected)
• Joy Buolamwini (2021 – projected)
• Pedro Reynolds-Cuellar (2022 – projected)
• Chelsea Barabas (2022 – projected)

Doctoral Theses, Reader:

• Thomas Smythe (2013), Georgia Tech, Social Media, Elections and Democracy in West Africa
• Karen Brennan (2013), MIT, Best of both worlds: Issues of structure and agency in computational creation, in and out of school.
• William Li (2016) MIT, Language Technologies for Understanding Law, Politics, and Public Policy
• Edwina Portocarrero (2017) MIT, Networked Playscapes: Redefining the Playground
• Amy Zhang (2019) MIT, Systems to Improve Online Discussion

S.M. Theses, Advisor:

SM Media Arts and Sciences, MIT

• (2020, projected) Arwa Michelle Mboya, “allo-i: Measuring the African Imagination”
• (2020, projected) Rubez Chong, “Countering Audio Surveillance with Camp”
• (2017) Joy Buolamwini “Algorithmic Justice League”
• (2017) Sands Fish “Designing the Police”
• (2015) Ali Hashmi, “Said-Huntington Discourse Analyzer : a machine-learning tool for classifying and analyzing discourse”
• (2015) Alexis Hope, “FOLD”
• (2015) Jude Mwenda, “Mapjack : a mobile based Wiki for collaborative map making”
• (2014) Erhardt Graeff, “Action path : a location-based tool for civic reflection and engagement”
• (2014) Catherine d’Ignazio “Engineering serendipity : Terra Incognita and other strange encounters with global news”
• (2013) Nathan Matias, “Networked tactics for gender representation in the news”
• (2013) Matt Stempeck, “Participatory aid marketplace : designing online channels for digital humanitarians”

SM Comparative Media Studies, MIT

• (2020) Anna Chung, “Algorithmic Influence and Resistance”
• (2016) Gordon Mangum, “DeepStream.tv: Designing Informative and Engaging Live Streaming Video Experiences”
• (2015) Chelsea Barabas, “Engineering the American dream : a study of bias and perceptions of merit in the high-tech labor market”
• (2015) Heather Craig, “Interactive data narrative: designing for public engagement”
• (2014) Rodrigo Davies, “Civic crowdfunding : participatory communities, entrepreneurs and the political economy of place”
• (2014) Alexandre Gonçalves, “Conflicting Frames : the dispute over the meaning of rolezinhos in Brazilian media”
• (2013) Chris Peterson, “User-generated censorship : manipulating the maps of social media”
• (2013) Molly Sauter, “Distributed denial of service actions and the challenge of civil disobedience on the Internet”

Masters in Engineering, MIT

• (2017) Katrine Tjolsen
• (2015) Anurag Kashyap

Additionally, I served as reader for more than two dozen Masters theses at MIT, in Media Arts and Sciences and Comparative Media Studies and Writing.