Karim Nader

I am a Postdoctoral Associate in the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing at MIT. I received my Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023.

I am interested in the nature of virtual reality and our experience within it. My dissertation argues that virtual reality is fictional, meaning that our engagement with it is imaginative, and that our actions therein create fictional representations. I am also writing about our attitudes (beliefs, imaginings, desires) in fiction and interactive fiction.

I also write about the technological mediation of sex and love on dating apps. I argue that technological affordances change the way we look for sex and love by redirecting our romantic and sexual values. This threatens our autonomy. I am interested in how people negotiate with algorithms to make technologies work for them.

I am also interested in other issues at the intersection of ethics and aesthetics, the ethics of information and technology, algorithmic bias, and algorithmic decision making.

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"Do we have a right to be swiped?" at the Arizona Feminist Philosophy Graduate Conference

"Virtual fictional actions: What we can learn from policies on video game violence" at the University of Glasgow's Center for the Study of Perceptual Experience