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
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
Authors: Anastasiya Popelo, Ann Yi Ngai, Hana Reid, Hanbhin Seon, Cezara-Teona Zaharia
Affiliation: LSE Law School
Abstract:
Despite the extensive academic discussion on borderless personal and legal repercussions of deepfakes, limited studies have explicitly investigated the youth’s awareness about non-consensual deepfakes and perception of the need for stricter law enforcement...
Keywords: non-consensual deepfakes, criminalisation, gender-based violence, victim-centred laws, students
From Roles to Realities: Participatory Speculative Art as a Tool for Gender and Reproductive Futures
Author: Shuang Cai¹, Ruichao Jiang²
Affiliation: ¹Human Centered Design, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, United States
²Independent Researchers, New York, New York, United States
Abstract:
New Assisted Reproductive Technology (New ART) is a speculative reproductive clinic installation, where the artist and the curator transformed a traditional gallery space in NYC to examine how immersive design and participatory process engage audiences in reimagining gender roles. The study is guided by the research question: “How has participatory world-building in speculative art assisted in reimagining binary gender divisions?”...
Keywords: Speculative Art, Speculative Design, Gender Studies, Male Pregnancy, Non-Binary Perspectives, Reproductive Politics, Immersive Experiences, Fanfiction Subcultures
Interpretable Transfer Learning with EfficientNetB0 for Automated Detection of Rare Anemia Morphologies in Peripheral Blood Smears
Author: Aria Kana¹, Sanja Brolih² and Rik van der Veen³
Affiliation: ¹Hunter College High School, New York, NY, USA
²Center of Medicine Discoveries, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
³Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Abstract:
Accurate diagnosis of rare anemias is challenging primarily due to limited annotated public datasets needed for developing interpretable automated diagnostic tools. We propose a two-stage transfer learning convolutional neural network (CNN) model, EfficientNetB0, for identification of disease-associated patterns in blood smear images...
Keywords: Transfer Learning, EfficientNetB0, Peripheral Blood Smears, Rare Anemia Detection, Grad-CAM
Policing Desire and Governing Death: The Necropolitics of Sex Work in India
Author: Saptadha Sengupta
Affiliation: London School of Economics and Political Science
Abstract:
This paper examines how the Indian state enacts gendered necropolitics through the criminalisation of sex work, focusing on the solicitation provisions of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act (ITPA). The central argument is that the state produces ‘death worlds’, which are zones of legal, spatial, and economic abandonment, by designating sex workers as victims in law while simultaneously criminalising their survival strategies...
Keywords: sex-work, necropolitics, criminalisation, decolonial feminism, ITPA, agency, carceral state
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.