Kangsan Lee
About
Kangsan Lee is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Korea University. Prior to joining Korea University, he was an Assistant Professor of Social Research and Public Policy at New York University Abu Dhabi, where he was affiliated with the Business, Organizations, and Society program. He has served on the editorial board of Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media, and the Arts.
Lee’s research examines how value is socially constructed, negotiated, and transformed across different social contexts, particularly amid uncertainty, crisis, and global change. His work spans creative markets, including the art world, financial markets such as cryptocurrency, and the social implications of emerging technologies. Drawing on economic sociology, cultural sociology, and network analysis, he employs a multi-method approach that combines computational methods, including machine learning and computer vision, with surveys and online experiments to investigate how individuals and institutions evaluate people, objects, and ideas.
His recent research explores the social implications of artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on how generative AI reshapes social relationships, trust, self-disclosure, and the negotiation of social values. This work examines how people navigate the boundaries between human relationships and AI-mediated interactions, and how cultural norms and social inequalities shape the ways individuals perceive and engage with AI. His broader research also addresses how social value systems respond to technological disruption, economic instability, and global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lee’s work has appeared in leading academic journals and scholarly publications, including Social Forces, Science Advances, Scientific Reports, Poetics, Journal of International Money and Finance, and Socius, as well as books and reference works published by Stanford University Press, Oxford Bibliographies in Sociology, and Elgar. He is also developing computational approaches to the study of global art markets, including methods based on transfer learning to address data disparities across countries and cultural contexts.
His research has received support from institutions including the Buffett Institute for International Studies at Northwestern University, the American Assembly at Columbia University, and the Office of Research at Zayed University. Beyond academia, Lee has contributed his expertise to discussions of entrepreneurship, innovation, and cultural development through platforms such as Sky News Arabia, the MIT Enterprise Forum, Startup India, and CultureSTATS at the Department of Culture and Tourism–Abu Dhabi. He has also served on the advisory board of Ma’an, the UAE’s Authority of Social Contribution.