Fall 2025 Events

Abstract

The First World War was not only a war of Western European Empires but also one that mobilized four million non-white men, including over 140,000 Chinese laborers recruited to supplement workforce shortages. The contribution of the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) to the First World War has long been framed as a “forgotten” history, but this study asks a further question: What exactly are we remembering? 

In reading two wartime diaries from the CLC – the journal of Chinese laborer Sun Gan (1882-1961) and the sketch diary of Irish Lieutenant Jim Maultsaid (1893-1971) – this paper contends a decolonial reading of the First World War that also counters nationalist mythmaking through the multi-layered labor of the CLC. First, I use the term “military Taylorism,” a fusion of military hierarchy and industrial-efficiency principles, to reveal how discourses of advanced technology in accounts of industrial war obscure the essential role of human, and in this case, nonwhite labor. Second, I approach the war as a site of racial entanglements, where semi-colonial interactions in the crucible of modern warfare were deeply embedded in the military chain of command system, yet individual actors exercised their agency to create disruptions and solidarities. Finally, I trace the writing and editing of these diaries long after the conclusion of the war, arguing that this therapeutic writing, situated between the private and the public, and the very form of wartime journals – fragmented, discontinuous, incoherent – carry an inherent irony that unsettles progressive historical narratives. 

Bio

Tianyun Hua is a GPS Postdoctoral Fellow at NYU Shanghai. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from University of California, Davis. Tianyun studies the subaltern diasporas of Global Asias from the nineteenth to twentieth century, with particular attention to the intersections of literature, labor, race, and the environment. Her book project, Coolie Crossings: Transnational Labor Migration and Sinophone Literature, 1900-1949, combines archival and literary methodologies to trace the genealogy of race and labor in Sinophone narratives across continents. She is also working on a second project on transpacific botanical network in the twentieth century, drawing on critical plant studies, history of science, and literary and media studies.

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Moderated by: Jin Han

Abstract

This talk examines "irony poisoning" as a mode of reading practice for contemporary fiction. In such a paranoid and relentless mode of reading, readers reject the generative potential of irony, particularly in texts about gender. I read how Megan Boyle’s alt lit book Liveblog and Tony Tulathimutte’s short story collection Rejection critique the post-internet imperative to uncritically link author and character, particularly for women writers and writers of color. Through writing networked fictions, these authors mimic the feeling of being online while at the same time inviting readers to engage with their work as archives of online content. By turning their respective works into “internet archives,” Boyle and Tulathimutte blend the real and the author, the internet and the author, and fiction and the author in order to question the mechanisms of verification that are embedded into online life. In this talk, I suggest that, as post-internet texts, Liveblog and Rejection present networked fiction without hyperlinks. Rather than literally incorporate links, these texts create a post-internet affect of network that mimics using the internet and its infrastructures without representing them which provides a cure for irony poisoned reading practices. 

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Moderated by: Jennifer Egloff

Abstract

Fraud is one of the oldest crimes, grounded in the simple logic of exploiting human weakness through deception. Yet in today’s hyperconnected digital world, it has evolved into a fast-moving, shape-shifting phenomenon that mirrors the pace of technological and social change. From AI-generated “deepfake CEOs” authorising multimillion-dollar wire transfers to romantic chatbots spinning synthetic yet personalised love stories for financial gain, fraud now thrives at the intersection of innovation and illusion. Far from being a static phenomenon, it has become a reflection of how technological progress continually reshapes opportunity, risk, and human vulnerability.

Traditional frameworks for studying crime—such as crime scripts, originally developed to describe physical-world offenses in a step-by-step sequence—were designed to explain how crimes unfold and to pinpoint opportunities for intervention along that process. This approach assumes a degree of stability: that offenders follow recognisable patterns and that these intervention windows remain relatively constant over time. Yet as fraud increasingly intertwines with AI, automation, and social disruption, its mechanisms evolve too rapidly for such static models to keep pace.

In response, this work proposes a futures-oriented approach in how we study (cyber)crime that shifts focus from step-by-step procedures to the environments in which future crimes may emerge. Instead of mapping past behaviour, this method anticipates how specific disruptions—such as climate change, disruptive technologies, or financial crashes—might produce situational precipitators that signal opportunity for crime and increase vulnerability among victims. Using tools like scoping reviews, Delphi expert panels, and interactive Sandpit workshops, experts collaboratively identify environmental triggers, emotional cues, and communication patterns likely to be exploited in fraudulent scenarios. These conditions then inform hypothetical fraud/cybercrime scripts that can be evaluated and used to train automated detection tools, such as NLP models scanning victim reports or social media.

This approach moves beyond the constraints of fitting fast-evolving, noisy phenomena into outdated theoretical moulds. Instead, it introduces a prospective mode of thinking—one that emphasises anticipation over explanation, and adaptability over static categorisation. By integrating futures and foresight methods, it enables both researchers and practitioners to identify weak signals, track change in real time, and simulate how new forms of harm may emerge.

Speaker's Bio

Dr. Manja Nikolovska is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Psychology at NYU Shanghai, contributing to the AI for Social Good cluster, and an Honorary Fellow at Dawes Centre for Future Crime at UCL.

Her background falls on the intersection of computational social science, criminology and futures and foresight. Her research explores how humans adapt and build resilience amid rapid technological and social change, with a focus on fostering trust, safety, and wellbeing in digital environments.  Recent projects explore how AI can be harnessed to promote safe online habits and reduce exposure to fraud, including among older adults who are increasingly navigating AI-driven tools in their daily lives. Her current work at NYU Shanghai will use the Delphi method as a foresight tecnique to examine AI adoption among professionals who interview child abuse victims, with particular attention to how large language models may assist in sensitive interviewing practices.

Her research has been funded and conducted in collaboration with organisations such as the UK Home Office, UK’s Accelerated Capability Environment, and the Finnish Cultural Foundation, translating data and foresight into actionable social policy and practice.

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Moderated by: Jin Han

Kant repeatedly characterizes the Transcendental Analytic as a “logic of truth”. Yet few interpreters have chosen to read Kant’s Transcendental Analytic as being centrally focused on the notion of truth. Instead, it has been common to read Kant as being primarily concerned with some adjacent notions, such as justification, awareness, or contentfulness.  I believe this setting aside of truth is a mistake, and I aim to propose a way to rectify this mistake. My proposal will center on a re-reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, and specifically his account of the “three-fold synthesis” as providing a theory of truth.  First, I situate Kant’s discussion of “agreement”, “conformity” and “relation to an object” in its historical context, by showing that all three of these notions were traditionally used in definitions and debates about the nature of truth. Second, I explain how, given a proper understanding of these notions, transcendental idealism has a problem making sense of truth. Third, I show that Kant's “three-fold synthesis” in the Transcendental Deduction is best read as a solution to the problems by presenting an alternative theory of truth.

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Moderated by: Jennifer Egloff