Fall 2025 Events
Co-organizers: Jennifer Egloff & Jin Han
Program Associate: Almee Wang & Viv Wu
email: shanghai.hssc@nyu.edu
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Thursday, November 13, 2025
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Futures Methods for Evolving Social Challenges: Anticipating Online Fraud and Beyond
Futures Methods for Evolving Social Challenges: Anticipating Online Fraud and Beyond
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
Thursday, November 6, 2025
Thursday, November 6, 2025
Frequent Academic Labor Migrants and Home Affect: How Home is a Temporal Affect Produced by Homing and Material Objects
Frequent Academic Labor Migrants and Home Affect: How Home is a Temporal Affect Produced by Homing and Material Objects
Based on interviews with 11 academic labor migrants who all move internationally for work many times, I look at how serial or frequent academic migrants use objects and homing practices to create a home affect upon arrival. While the migrants attempt to achieve familiarity, comfort, control, and other positive emotions they desire in their home affect, their home affect very often includes pockets of discomfort, lack of control, distress, and even displacement. These other emotions do not negate the sense of home, or home affect, experienced by the migrants, but complicates it. This study expands current home and migration research by focusing on serial academic migrants and how objects and practices are used, shaped, and reshaped over the course of many moves to make home. This study also builds on the underinvestigated role of time and temporality in home research.
Based on interviews with 11 academic labor migrants who all move internationally for work many times, I look at how serial or frequent academic migrants use objects and homing practices to create a home affect upon arrival. While the migrants attempt to achieve familiarity, comfort, control, and other positive emotions they desire in their home affect, their home affect very often includes pockets of discomfort, lack of control, distress, and even displacement. These other emotions do not negate the sense of home, or home affect, experienced by the migrants, but complicates it. This study expands current home and migration research by focusing on serial academic migrants and how objects and practices are used, shaped, and reshaped over the course of many moves to make home. This study also builds on the underinvestigated role of time and temporality in home research.
Speaker's Bio:
Terra has a background in education and anthropology and currently works in the EAP department at NYUSH. She has lived and worked in 5 different countries over 7 years and is interested in topics on migrations, education, and disability. She is presenting a portion of her MA thesis in social anthropology.
Moderated by: Jennifer Egloff
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Thursday, October 16, 2025
Underestimation of Support for Climate Policies and Ways to Correct It
Underestimation of Support for Climate Policies and Ways to Correct It
Despite majority of citizens in most countries currently supporting climate mitigation and adaptation policies, people consistently underestimate this support. Such misperceptions can suppress individual and collective action on climate change through processes known as the spiral of silence and pluralistic ignorance. I first present results from my correlational studies (Prolific users in the U.S., Ns = 1912, 478) exploring the predictors and mechanisms of this underestimation. Results suggest that Americans’ information environment (e.g., frequency of climate discussions, exposure to conservative media) and their desire to share reality with others are the strongest predictors of misperceptions. Moreover, our data suggest that seeing others engage in environmentally harmful behaviors lowers perceived public support for climate policies more strongly than seeing environmentally helpful behaviors raises it. Finally, I introduce an experiment (Prolific, N = 2,606) testing whether correcting this misperception can improve climate attitudes and willingness to take climate action. Two weeks after the intervention, our correction produced a positive effect among participants who accurately remembered the provided poll results. Taken together, these findings suggest practical guidelines for when and how normative information can effectively promote collective action in domains such as climate change.
Despite majority of citizens in most countries currently supporting climate mitigation and adaptation policies, people consistently underestimate this support. Such misperceptions can suppress individual and collective action on climate change through processes known as the spiral of silence and pluralistic ignorance. I first present results from my correlational studies (Prolific users in the U.S., Ns = 1912, 478) exploring the predictors and mechanisms of this underestimation. Results suggest that Americans’ information environment (e.g., frequency of climate discussions, exposure to conservative media) and their desire to share reality with others are the strongest predictors of misperceptions. Moreover, our data suggest that seeing others engage in environmentally harmful behaviors lowers perceived public support for climate policies more strongly than seeing environmentally helpful behaviors raises it. Finally, I introduce an experiment (Prolific, N = 2,606) testing whether correcting this misperception can improve climate attitudes and willingness to take climate action. Two weeks after the intervention, our correction produced a positive effect among participants who accurately remembered the provided poll results. Taken together, these findings suggest practical guidelines for when and how normative information can effectively promote collective action in domains such as climate change.
Speaker's Bio:
Junho Lee joined New York University Shanghai as a postdoctoral teaching fellow of psychology in the fall 2025. He received his PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University in Boston, primarily working on a project funded by the US National Science Foundation on perception of social norms involving climate change. He investigates how people use various (and often ambiguous) information to make sense of the complex social world, and is interested in applying theories of moral psychology, causal reasoning, and social cognition to topical issues including the environment, inequality, and polarization.
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.
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.
Moderated by: Jennifer Egloff
Damian Melamedoff-Vosters is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at NYU Shanghai. He received his PhD from the University of Toronto. He specializes in 18th century German philosophy, with an emphasis on Kant's theoretical philosophy.
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