Bridging Horizons:
Innovation, Identity, and Global Futures
Volume 1, Issue 3 — March 2026
Published March 2026
ISSN: 3069-8200
Building on the intellectual trajectory established in previous issues, this volume further affirms PJIR’s dedication to careful, cross-disciplinary inquiry into questions of contemporary significance. The contributions gathered here reflect a research landscape in which technological change, environmental constraint, and shifting social norms increasingly intersect.
Two Best Paper selections exemplify this breadth: "Deepfakes On Trial: A Mixed-Methods Study of Student Perceptions and Regulatory Concerns about Non-Consensual Deepfakes at the London School of Economics and Political Science," which interrogates the ethical and regulatory implications of emerging synthetic media technologies. Meanwhile, "Interpretable Transfer Learning with EfficientNetB0 for Automated Detection of Rare Anemia Morphologies in Peripheral Blood Smears" demonstrates how advances in machine learning and biomedical imaging can be translated into clinically meaningful diagnostic tools, highlighting the growing convergence of computational innovation and medical practice.
Alongside the two Best Paper selections, this volume features contributions addressing religion and social meaning, structural inequality, developments in the life sciences, and more. We hope these studies encourage readers to draw connections across fields and to approach complex contemporary questions with intellectual openness.
All accepted articles are published online under ISSN 3069-8200.
Editor’s Note
Serious scholarship often begins with a single, well-defined question. Yet the moment we follow that question far enough, we find it rarely stays in one place. Questions about attention become questions about education and equity. Questions about algorithms become questions about trust and accountability. Questions about biological systems quickly intersect with questions about human experience. This issue brings together work that reflects precisely this movement across boundaries.
In this volume, we are proud to feature research on ADHD, the effects of racial bias in dermatology datasets on convolutional neural networks, the emerging legal terrain of deepfakes, sustainable building materials, structural inequality, developments in the life sciences, and more. The issue also includes work engaging questions of religion and belief, examining gender and social identity, and exploring problems in linguistics, and more.
We celebrate interdisciplinary scholarship not as a slogan, but as a practice. The work collected here demonstrates careful technical reasoning alongside ethical awareness and social sensitivity. It shows that strong research does not dilute disciplinary rigor; rather, it is often strengthened when scholars remain attentive to the wider implications of their methods and findings.
PJIR Editorial Team
Articles in This Issue
A Marxist Approach of the Indian Economy in The White Tiger
Author: Shafika Fathima
Affiliation: Women's Christian College
Abstract:
The White Tiger is a narrative of Balram Halwai, who was born in the ‘darkness’ and desires to escape the poverty that surrounds him. It has been widely critiqued through both an optimistic and critical lens. Many researchers have attempted post-colonial readings, subaltern approaches and animal studies approaches...
Keywords: Marxism, socio-economic structures, darkness, light
Addressing the Organ Donor Shortage Through Organoid Transplantation
Author: Vicky Qin
Affiliation: Lynbrook High School
Abstract:
Organoid transplantation is an emerging regenerative medicine with the potential to address the global organ shortage. Organoids, as three-dimensional (3D), miniature structures derived from stem cells, can mimic structural and functional aspects of human organs. This paper explores the current research and clinical testing of organoid transplantation and states the advantages of organoid transplantation...
Keywords: organoids, organoid transplantation
Unveiling Truth Through Gestures: A Multimodal Deepfake Detection System
Author: Vishruth I. Rao
Affiliation: Eastlake High School
Abstract:
Over the past few years, generative artificial intelligence and other deepfake technologies have been improving every day. Although these technologies have many useful applications, they are also being used maliciously to spread fake news, blackmail, scam, and cause cyberattacks. Thus, it is important to accurately detect if these videos are real or if they are the creation of artificial intelligence...
Keywords: deepfake detection, gestures, keypoints, artifacts, deepfakes
Exploring the Relationship Between Dominant Variant Emergence and Sequence Divergence Throughout the Sars-COV2 (COVID-19) Pandemic
Author: Varin Nallabothula
Affiliation: Redmond High School, 10735 Elliston Way NE, Redmond, Washington 98053, USA
Abstract:
Viruses have a unique evolutionary landscape as they compete with one another and jump to different hosts. This is an understudied area of research, but due to the ongoing pandemic and the widely available sequence data there are new possibilities for understanding how viral genome evolution occurs...
Keywords: SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; Genomic surveillance; Viral evolution; Sequence divergence; Dominant variants; Mutation rate; Phylogenetic analysis; Genetic variability; RNA virus
Citation for This Issue
Princeton Journal of Interdisciplinary Research. (2026). Volume 1, Issue 3 — Bridging Horizons. PJIR.
https://www.princeton-press.com/pjir/issues/vol-1-issue-3
Open Access Statement
This journal is fully open access. All articles are freely available to read, download, and share without subscription or access barriers. We encourage scholars to cite and engage with the research published here, as such scholarly exchange plays an important role in supporting emerging and early-career researchers and advancing ongoing academic conversations.