Research Advisory Committee
	Criteria for evaluating research proposals
	Completed projects
	Current projects
	Projects under development

CURRENT PROJECTS

12. Developing a Model for Electronic Dictionaries
The advent of the electronic area has opened new ways to conceptualise and to organise knowledge. Paradoxically, electronic dictionaries have not exploited these possibilities. They are merely electronic versions of printed dictionaries and generally of a mediocre quality. The project aims to develop a new theoretical model for electronic dictionaries. In the multilingual context of Africa, this will be of special relevance.

Project leader: Rufus Gouws
Fellows: Herbert Wiegand (Heidelberg), Ulrich Heid (Stuttgart), Paul Mavoungou (Libreville), Afana Ostage (Libreville)

13. A Critical Assessment of New Developments in Complexity Theory
Increased awareness (mainly as result of the impact of technology) of the complexity of the physical, biological and social world has stimulated new developments in Complexity Theory. The project will explore the new ways to understand and model complex systems in four specific areas: Philosophy; Mathematics, Physics and Computational Sciences; Biological Sciences; and Organisational and Social Sciences.

Project leader: Paul Cilliers

14. Towards a New Humanism
“Why do we simply fail to establish a more human society in South Africa? In spite of lofty expectations of a “better life for all”, of the restoration of human dignity, of a society free from discrimination, inequality, racism, sexism, corruption, self-enrichment and fear, we, in 2010, apparently are further removed from this ideal than in 1994. Human lives seem rather to have become cheaper. Selfishness, corruption and self-enrichment flourish and new forms of discrimination are coming to the fore. The excitement of a new beginning has begun to make way for the disillusioning realisation that large sections of the old dispensation are stubbornly maintained and that the errors of the past are being repeated.” The question concerning where things went wrong and how a more human society can be brought about in practice in South Africa is one of the country’s greatest challenges. “

Two symposia on this topic have been sponsored and arranged by STIAS, most recently 24-26 Feb 2010, each with about 30 participants; a book publication is being prepared for publication in 2011.

Project leader: John De Gruchy (Cape Town)
Fellows: Antjie Krog (U Western Cape), Harry Kunneman (UvH, Utrecht), Thaddeus Metz (U Johannesburg), Ebrahim Moosa (Duke)
SU Researchers: Paul Cilliers, Jannie Hofmeyr, Bernard Lategan
Publication: Being Human Together in South Africa Today: A Contribution to the Debate, SUN MeDIA, Stellenbosch (to appear)

15. The Role of Knowledge Experts
The advent of the knowledge society has placed the spotlight on the role of experts as gatekeepers and as brokers of knowledge. This is a problem that concerns developed and developing countries alike. In developing countries the problem is exacerbated by the imbalances in the production and access to knowledge, increasing the possibility of a new form of ‘knowledge colonialisation’ and dependency.

Project leader: Peter Weingart (Bielefeld)

16. Bilingual Education
A socio-linguistic investigation into the challenges and possibilities of bilingual education for children, communities and wider society. The focus will be on the role which the linguistic and literary practices of students and teachers in these situations play in the formation of linguistic and cultural identities. By comparing the use of English and Spanish in New York City with the situation of bilingual education in South Africa, the aim is to contribute to the formation of educational policy for ethno-linguistic minorities in ethnically and culturally diverse contexts.

Fellow: Ofelia Garcia (New York)

17. Genres of Critique
This project seeks to open and explore a liminal space for critique between aesthetics and politics. We wish to elaborate and expand the meaning and significance of critique for political and legal discourse. Although these questions have broader significance, our focus and immediate grounding will be concerned with African and South African implications. Drawing on multiple aesthetic forms, especially literature, we will seek to develop a genre of critique that supersedes realism and linguistic indeterminacy in existing genres of critique. Some contextualisation of our project in relation to existing approaches to critical legal discourse will help to situate it.

Project leaders: Karin van Marle (U Pretoria), Stewart Motha (U Kent)
Fellows: Mark Antaki (McGill), Denise Ferreira-Da Silva (UC, San Diego), George Pavlich (U Alberta), Patricia Tuitt (Birkbeck College), Jagath Weerasinghe (U Kelaniya)

18. The HIV-Exposed but Uninfected (HEU) Infant: How Can the Excess Morbidity and Mortality be Explained?
This project has expanded beyond the initial STIAS realm and is the outgrowth of an initiative developed between STIAS and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS), associated with the University of British Columbia. An interdisciplinary colloquium, the first Peter Wall Colloquium Abroad, was held at STIAS in November 2009 and sought explanations for why babies exposed to HIV but uninfected by their mothers are at enhanced risk of poor health and development during the first year of life.

This interdisciplinary colloquium was organised and sponsored within the framework of a formal partnership agreement between STIAS and PWIAS and took place against the following background.

Every year, approximately 10.6 million children die before the age of five years, mostly in low or middle income countries. Approximately 20% of babies in South Africa are born to mothers who are infected with HIV, and with effective mother to child prevention of transmission programs the rate of transmission to the babies during pregnancy and delivery can be as low as 5%. For reasons that remain to be explained, babies exposed to HIV but uninfected (HEU) by their mothers are at enhanced risk of poor health and development during the first year of life.

The two-day meeting was attended by researchers and clinicians from South Africa, Zimbabwe, Canada, Belgium and the United States. A total of 20 attendees presented papers and discussed the multiple dimensions of this problem in an attempt to plan a study to explain this peculiar phenomenon. Potential contributing factors include poverty, malnutrition, lack of access to health care and exposure to adverse environmental factors and/or transmissible infectious diseases. Nonetheless, many children exposed to HIV remain healthy. It remains unclear why some children fall ill and others thrive despite exposure to apparently similar environmental and social challenges. It is essential to better understand the spectrum and determinants of HIV-related health and disease in children from low and middle income countries as the first step in their prevention.

Susceptibility to disease of any type is multifaceted, involving, among other factors, genetics, environmental exposures (toxins, pollution, microbes), nutrition and psychosocial conditions. Many studies have been performed in the developed world to identify the factors that put children at risk for suffering from HIV-related illnesses, but none has identified severe disease in those babies who are not infected (HEU). There is a dearth of information from the developing world where this phenomenon has now been identified in sub-Saharan Africa and in South America. Analyses can be performed at a point in time (by case control) or in a prospective study. Whereas the latter is more expensive than the former, a cohort study has many advantages and is most likely to inform strategies for enhancing the care of children in resource-limited settings. A longitudinal study at Tygerberg Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa is accordingly being planned to identify why HEU babies suffer so much illness during the first year of life

A number of follow-up collaborative projects between SU, UBC and other institutions have also resulted.

Project leader (STIAS component) and coordinator: David Speert (U British Columbia)
SU Researchers: Mark Cotton, Monika Esser, Mariana Kruger and Ben Marais

19. Ecoinformatics
The discipline of Bioinformatics has emerged in the field of molecular and cell biology to deal with the huge amounts of information generated first by genomic and more recently by transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic studies. A parallel field labelled Ecoinformatics is emerging to encompass the interpretation of data relevant to ecological and broader environmental processes. According to a Wikipedia entry, Ecoinformatics is aimed at facilitating environmental research and management by developing ways to access and integrate databases and develop new algorithms to test ecological hypotheses. Hence it encompasses not only the management and dissemination of information, but also ecological modelling and statistical assessment.

In South Africa, a pioneering thrust in Ecoinformatics has been made by a collaboration between the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Kruger Park’s Scientific Services division, but this remains unsupported by any South African academic structure. The need in South Africa for such support is especially urgent following the establishment of the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) by the Department of Science and Technology, aimed at establishing the consequences of climate shifts and land use change for ecosystem services, biodiversity and human livelihoods.

The aim of the project is to develop a structured approach towards addressing the challenges and opportunities presented with special relevance to African conditions.

Project leader: Wayne Getz (Berkeley)
Fellows: Norman Owen-Smith (Witwatersrand), Lev Ginzburg (SUNY Stony Brook), Eloy Revilla (CSIC, Sevilla), David Saltz (Ben Gurion)

20. The Global Crisis and the Future of Democracy
The project is concerned with the sustainability of democracy around the globe in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial and economic crisis. Its underlying hypothesis holds that the crisis might have occasioned a shift towards a different geo-political configuration, away from the paradigm established in the mid-1970s and accelerated after the collapse of the Soviet Bloc in which many countries in all the regions of the world aspired to adopt the model epitomised by the established democracies of the North-West with their seemingly ever-progressing economic development and a set of institutions considered well worth emulating.

The global crisis, having taken a heavy economic toll on most nations, undermined the conviction that democracy and economic development must necessarily go hand in hand; it might also have shaken confidence in democracy itself. The project assumes that such developments could potentially give rise to a new global arrangement in which another model, or models, for a political system might emerge as preferable to the Western liberal democratic type, notably the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism.

An established team of researchers comprising social scientists, economists and historians explore the causes of the crisis; compare it with the crash of 1929 and its consequence; link the economy with democracy; analyse competing models of coping with the crisis; consider a possible global re-configuration; and propose ways in which to overcome the crisis by accommodating the diversity of existing value systems based on tradition, religion, ideology or secular humanism, rather than by imposing one particular value system.

Project Leader: Ursula van Beek (SU)
Fellows: Dirk Berg-Schlosser (Marburg), Yilmaz Esmer (Bahcesehir), Ursula Hoffman-Lange (Bamberg), Edmund Wnuk-Lipinski (Polish Academy of Sciences), Laurence Whitehead (Oxford)
SU Researchers: Pierre du Toit, Stan du Plessis & Philip Mohr

21. Faith and Fabric
In 2005/2006 the Centre for Advanced Studies in Berlin hosted an inter-disciplinary research project on “secular modernity” in which world-renowned Fellows like Hans Joas (German sociologist, director of the Max Weber Center in Erfurt, professor of the University of Chicago), who led the project, Charles Taylor (Canadian philosopher) and Jose Casanova (sociologist of religion from New York), amongst others, studied the nature of secularisation and the presence and role or religion in different so-called “modern” societies. Among the first products of this year was the major award-winning work by Taylor, A secular age (Harvard University Press, 2007). Broadly speaking, and by way of generalization, one may say that they all reject – for different reasons, from different academic disciplines and providing different scholarly accounts – the so-called “mainline secularization theory,” that has been taken for granted for so long by many theorists and ordinary people in specific societies – that “modernity brings about secularity.

The STIAS project revisits these questions in an African context

Project leader: Dirkie Smit (SU)
Fellows: Hans Joas (U Erfurt), Wolfgang Huber (Humboldt U, Berlin)
SU Researchers: Bernard Lategan

22. Agro-food Regimes, Rural Poverty and Social Change in Southern Africa
Household food insecurity in rural Southern Africa has its roots in policies that supported large scale commercial farming by white settlers and the creation of spatially separate ‘reserves’ for black households. Smallholder farming was discouraged, and agriculture became a livelihood adjunct to labour migration. Commercial farms evolved into sophisticated components of commodity chains increasingly dominated by large companies involved in the supply of farm inputs, agro-processing and food retailing.

Rural development policies in the region have combined support for smallholder farmers, the redistribution of some commercial farmland and tenure reform. They have not attempted to restructure the agro-food regime, and large scale farms continue to dominate. Poverty and food insecurity remain major problems. Programmes to promote smallholder production often assume the existence of stable rural populations and social structures, but rural areas are characterized by rising populations, increased pressure on resources, growing inequalities, reduced remittances, high mortality from HIV/AIDS, and changing gender roles.

In this context, could well-conceived programmes of agrarian reform reduce household food insecurity, while maintaining the agricultural output needed to feed growing urban populations? What are the wider implications of the profound transformations currently taking place in the structure and composition of rural households, communities and livelihood systems? These thorny questions will be the focus of debate and discussion in early 2011.

Project leader: Ben Cousins (U Western Cape)
Fellows: Henry Bernstein (Univ London), James Ferguson (Stanford), Harriet Friedmann (Univ of Toronto, Mississauga), Bridget O’ Laughlin (ISS, The Hague), Pauline Peters (Harvard Kennedy School)



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