Projects

This project investigates what motivates artisans (motor park touts, scavengers, street hawkers) working in the informal economy of Lagos state, Nigeria to join secret cults gangs. It unpacks how the gang life of artisanal cult members helps to understand the character of youth deviance and criminality in contemporary Africa. While cult gangs were formed and based in tertiary institutions, they have now expanded into artisanal street-based youth groups with demonstrable lethality that accounted for 1,286 deaths between 2020 and 2025. Of these, the South-South geopolitical zone recorded 750 deaths, followed by 491 fatalities in the South-West , with Lagos (dominated by rival cult gangs such as Aiye (Neo Black Movement), Eiye (Airlords), and Buccaneer) recording the second-highest number of fatalities in the country. Using an exploratory design, the study relies on in-depth interviews with artisanal street secret cult gang members, as well as confessional statements from arrested members

Oludayo Tade

For more than a century and a half, the concept of "Bantu" — coined by Wilhelm Bleek to designate a family of languages across sub-Saharan Africa — has become one of the most collectively sustained narratives in African Studies. Historical linguistics, archaeology, and population genetics have successively constructed, borrowed from, and reinforced one another around this concept, in an interdisciplinary dialogue that Jan Vansina described as early as 1978 as a "dialogue of the deaf." This project proposes an intellectual history of that circularity. The aim is not to settle the empirical question of Bantu origins, but to understand how disciplines have produced an illusion of convergence by sharing a common formal model — the genealogical tree — without ever examining its foundations. The project traces this trajectory in four stages: the philological origins of the concept, its appropriation by programmed archaeology, its extension into contemporary genomics, and its political uses,

Adrien Delmas

The Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-1970 occasioned the Igbo pogrom and the lingering memory of starvation as a weapon of war. The collective trauma of the period has remained buried in the group’s consciousness. Existing literature on the war paid little attention to how the children of the survivors have appropriated the memories of their parents’ violent past.

Ngozika Obi-Ani

A Practice to Hold the Salt Wind is a work of literary oral history, attending to how people remember themselves free inside conditions that refuse their freedom: across the diaspora, across the Global South, across the present-tense foreclosures of migration and return. Built from fifteen years of oral history interviews, quotidian encounters, and the author's own inquiry in the wake of displacement, the book is structured as a chorus of encounters: returns to specific moments held with specific people, rendered through ethnopoetic transcription, essayistic prose, image, and assemblage. The book asks what archives a life whose agency has been foreclosed. It proposes that our horizons, our dreams, our acts of reaching are themselves a form of being. The practices we improvise to keep those horizons alive, in ritual, song, in a suitcase under a grandmother's bed, in the body that carries ancestry across generations, are the counter-ontology of the global majority. Grounded in Caribbean

Nyssa Chow

Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), encompassing Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, represents a global health challenge with no known cure. Current therapeutic paradigms focus primarily on suppressing inflammation, yet over 40% of patients fail to achieve clinical remission. This project proposes a shift toward mucosal healing, the active process of tissue regeneration, as a superior therapeutic target. By utilizing cutting-edge spatial biology technologies and computational pipelines, combined with human material and animal models, we aim to generate a high-resolution "Spatially Functional Atlas" of the healing intestine. Using non-commercially available technologies, this work will map host-microbiota interactions in situ, providing a blueprint for the next generation of non-immunosuppressive IBD treatments.

Eduardo Villablanca

The recent history of infectious diseases has shown that the number of epidemics and pandemics resulting from spillovers of animal viruses to humans is increasing. There is consensus that some of this increase is a direct result of human actions, although the drivers for such epidemics are complex, ranging from factors that increase the contact between humans and animals, (such as deforestation, climate-driven changes in ecosystems, and change in land use by development of high density farming), the rate of dispersal once humans become infected (for instance global travel and trade, migration), and the increased susceptibility of some part of the population (poverty, co-infections, ageing among others). This also implies that our current approach to epidemic research falls short, as it rarely includes the ecological perspective, thereby not looking at root causes of prevention and early detection. With colleagues from STIAS and beyond, I want to analyse which concepts from biomedical s

Marion Koopmans

This interdisciplinary fellowship investigates the theoretical and design foundations of aquaponics—a circular food-production system combining aquaculture and hydroponic plant cultivation within Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA).

Alyssa Joyce Erick Ogello Khalid Salie Maryam El Bakali Oliver Körner

The use of wastewater epidemiology approach has been on the rise recently due to its cost effectiveness and ability to identify emerging chemicals such as pesticides from wastewater.

Faith Kandie

Archives of the Ethical: Market Exchange, Ethical Relations, and Sensory Politics in the Urban South brings together in comparative perspective, historically situated ethnographic insights of urban market practices in Cape Town, Accra, and Mumbai.

Shaheed Tayob

The annual increase in the global population worldwide puts pressure on the food systems to avail enough food for all global citizens. Within the foods mostly consumed are those with a short life span, termed perishable produce that need special handling after harvest or slaughter. They include fish, meat, poultry, dairy products, eggs, fruit, and vegetables.

Matia Mukama

My project considers the experimental, partial, and sidelong representation of mothers in 20th-century Indian women’s literature. Hemmed in by idealized images of motherhood in the culture at large, these writers used alternative representations of mothers – what I call “bad” mothers – as a way of rethinking the family in relation to Indian modernity. I argue that the literature of maternal deviance advances new representational practices that use the malleability of language and innovations in form to imagine motherhood anew. They tell us something about what a feminist modernity might look like in the absence of a widely accepted language of feminism, and they convey the centrality of the family to modernity, beyond the politics of feminist empowerment. In this way they demonstrate the creative process of imagining modernity, a term which has often been written off as imitative, elite, male, and Brahminical. I argue that these authors use bad mothers to imagine a vernacular, postcolo

Ulka Anjaria

This project seeks to reposition Coloured identity through the lens of racialised military service, situating military participation as a central, yet underexamined site in which racial classification, state power, and identity intersect. It argues that the continued uncritical use of Apartheid-era racial categories in military history and memory reproduces epistemic violence and deepens psychosocial wounds. At present, the category Coloured functions less as a descriptive marker of cultural life and more as a residue of racial ordering that continues to shape access to recognition, veteran status, and dignity within post-Apartheid South Africa. This project seeks to develop a more nuanced understanding of Coloured military participation, one that recognises agency and sacrifice without reproducing narratives of complicity. This would allow space for historical repair, enabling Coloured soldiers and their descendants to reclaim military narratives that have been marginalised and silenc

Danille Elize Bester

The global system of scientific knowledge production is undergoing a structural transformation. For decades, African research systems have operated within what can be described as aid-dependent science systems, shaped by Western funding priorities, institutional partnerships, and epistemic hierarchies. Recent large-scale reductions in foreign aid—particularly following the dismantling of USAID and parallel cuts by major OECD donors—signal not merely a contraction of resources, but a potential transition toward a post-aid configuration of global science. This project advances the concept of multipolar knowledge regimes to analyse how African science is being reconfigured under conditions of shifting geopolitical power. It asks whether current developments represent a temporary disruption or a deeper transformation in the organisation of global knowledge production. Rather than treating Africa as a passive recipient of external influence, the study positions African research systems as a

Nelson Zavale

The project Bio/Psycho/Social builds on my work in the broad field of reproduction studies, framed in terms of “the First Thousand Days of Life”. It aims to investigate the conceptual apparatus concerned with ‘life’ – as inheritance, illness, population and care. Postgenomic science requires a concept of the social that is adequate to the task of representing lifeworlds beyond the reductionist frame of ‘social determinants of health’. We need a theory of the social that can do justice to worlding’s complex and lively processes, one that draws from local conceptions of what it means to be human and in relation with others, especially as those others are child-bearing persons and infants. It is critical that our theorising takes proper account of African epistemologies and lifeways. By interrogating 'biopsychosocial' as an oft-used concept that brings different domains into relation in the interests of human well-being, I will address the adequacy of our conceptual frameworks. The work w

Fiona Ross

During the last decade, significant advances have been made in the area of statistical demography. In particular, new methodologies have been developed for probabilistic population projections.

Hana Ševčíková

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for health is proliferating globally at an incredible rate.

Andrew Farlow

This project examines contemporary food systems under conditions of global transformation, focusing on the increasing reliance on imported processed foods in regions shaped by colonial histories and structural dependency. It conceptualizes food systems as infrastructures, understood not only as material networks of production and distribution, but also as social and everyday practices through which food becomes available and meaningful. The project takes canned corned beef as a strategic analytical entry point. Although seemingly mundane, this commodity embodies the historical entanglements of empire, industrial food production, and global trade, and today circulates widely in geographically remote and economically marginalized regions, where it plays complex and often ambivalent roles in everyday life. This study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among San communities in the Kalahari, alongside field research in South Africa as a site of production, and incorporates historical

Junko Maruyama - Erikawa

Non-communicable diseases, particularly cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, are becoming increasingly prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and have emerged as one of the region’s main causes of mortality. Despite this growing burden, SSA is characterised by a severe dearth of well researched context-specific mechanistic data, underdeveloped care provision infrastructure, and highly fragmented health policies. The current understanding of CMDs employed within the population in SSA, including pathophysiology, risk stratification, and treatment algorithms, is vastly derived from populations of European ancestry, limiting both the accuracy of risk prediction and the appropriateness of applied clinical interventions for SSA populations who exhibit distinct biological and phenotypic profiles. This proposal seeks to build directly on recently published foundational arguments from the Africa-Europe Cluster of Research Excellence collaborative and the A

Frederick Bukachi Peter Mwangi Leonard Baatiema

This project makes an original theoretical contribution to legal sociology and political economy by reconceptualising commissions of inquiry as constitutive institutions of modern capitalism rather than ad hoc mechanisms of accountability. Drawing on a decade of empirical research centred on South Africa, the study develops the first materialist theory of public inquiries written from the global South. It demonstrates how commissions function as quasi-legal technologies through which capitalist states manage crises of legitimacy arising from labour conflict, state violence and breakdowns in accumulation. Moving beyond dominant approaches that assess commissions in terms of truth, justice, or efficacy, the project treats them as analytical lenses through which to understand the political economy of legality itself. By analysing commission archives longitudinally and comparatively—from early British factory commissions, through colonial inquiries, to post-apartheid South Africa—the resea

Claire-Anne Lester

African Penguins are critically endangered, with fewer than 20,000 breeding pairs remaining compared to historical estimates exceeding one million. Effective conservation requires continuous population monitoring, but traditional methods are labour-intensive and cannot scale to meet current needs. This project develops practical artificial intelligence tools that enable automated monitoring of penguin populations using camera imagery. The core innovation addresses a fundamental problem: training AI models typically requires thousands of manually annotated images, which is prohibitively expensive for most conservation programmes. My research demonstrates that intelligent data selection combined with semi-automated annotation can reduce this requirement by over 40% while actually improving model accuracy. I will refine these methods, validate them across multiple monitoring sites, and deploy working systems with South African National Parks. This work establishes foundations for broader

Dane Brown

My research at STIAS uses a publicly available household data to explore the association between sex at birth and a mother’s wage employment status.

Germano Mwabu

The proposed study is a book length project on the ideologies that underpin discourses of resistance to the militarisation of relations between African countries and Western imperialists.

Isaac Mwinlaaru

The proposed project seeks to explore how retraction and recantation take shape in experimental writing of the 20th and 21st Century. Its guiding motif is the palinode: a literary-philosophical form used to reject one’s own previous writing. Out of this conjunction of the poetic and the philosophical, I hope to build a conceptual framework for two types of literary retraction.

Rick De Villiers

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is growing rapidly, and researchers are increasingly considering AI to help with labor-intensive and mundane research tasks. With new technology, risks are present and scientists may have trepidation. AI is evolving rapidly, yet researchers have very little guidance to understand the strengths, limitations, and potential risks as they consider new AI tools, and AI policies are often inconsistent or absent. This research is designed to address that lack of guidance, focused on qualitative and mixed methods research, which is used across social sciences, health sciences, and education. Qualitative research involves systematically gathering and analyzing information directly from those most knowledgeable, often through interviews (e.g., with patients, nurses, or physicians to understand experiences and perspectives). Mixed methods research integrates these results with quantitative (numeric) data gathered through surveys, organizational repositories

Timothy Guetterman

The next generation of wide-field sky surveys will transform time-domain astrophysics.

Ariel Goobar

Complexity measures are useful for the analysis of a system as a whole and allow to detect system malfunctioning. They apply to biology, geophysics, medicine, mechanics, and geography, to cite a few. As a complexity measure, ordinal pattern-based algorithms are efficient for discriminating time series, especially due to their high robustness against noise. However, the observation time they require prevents them from efficient application to experiments with limited data lengths. An example is given for low-resolution ECG beat analysis where the beat length does not exceed 500 samples. The proposed project aims to develop a new complexity measure based on an optimized ordinal pattern-based encoding approach to enhance the observation time requirement. The efficiency of the proposed approach will be verified in the detection and classification of ECG beats with premature ventricular and atrial contractions. Annotated data from Physionet will be used for validation purposes.

Jean Sire Armand Eyebe Fouda

My research proposal is centred around the completion of a book project. The envisaged book, which could be thought of as a volume of essays, is intended to unfold in four parts. Each of the parts relates to an area of intellectual work that I have researched and published in but have never compiled into a book. Together the four parts are intended to work across domains of intersection I would characterise as the present and futures of universities, art and politics, literature and climate change, and literary memoir. Below I offer a more extended description of the intended composition of the four parts, and I conclude by delineating the intended framing of the book and the kind of intervention it hopes to make.

Sarah Nuttall

This interdisciplinary project seeks to bridge microbiology, virology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to investigate how respiratory infections; particularly RSV and emerging viruses, impact long-term brain health through the lung-brain axis. In Africa, where respiratory illnesses are prevalent and neurodegenerative disorders are under-studied, this research aims to develop a Predictive, Preventive, Personalized Medicine (3PM) framework using multi-omics data (microbiome, metabolome, genomics) and machine learning. The project will: Profile lung and gut microbiota changes post-infection in African cohorts. Identify biomarkers linking respiratory pathogens to neuroinflammation and cognitive decline. Build a predictive AI model for neurodegenerative risk stratification. Propose low-cost, culturally adapted preventive strategies for at-risk populations. By integrating wet-lab research, data science, and community health engagement, this work will pioneer a translational, interd

Ousman Bajinka

The notion of being God’s chosen people is as dangerous an idea as any other in human history. It provides theological legitimation for ideologies such as Eurocentrism, white supremacy, British imperialism, Nazi supremacy, apartheid racism, the MAGA-ideology, and Zionism in multiple forms. Nevertheless, the intention of the term is arguably inclusive and affirming: It affirms the identity of those who are excluded and rejected, oppressed and marginalised, including migrants, refugees and the victims of xenophobia. Its focus is on the particular for the sake of the universal. This yields the intriguing question: where and how does a logic of inclusivity become as exclusivist as the exclusivism that it seeks to counter? This is primarily a philosophical question but one that is open to debate in historical studies, politics, economics, sociology, religion and theology alike. This project entails a case study of ideological distortion as part of a history of dangerous ideas. Its focus wil

Ernst Conradie

The proposed research will investigate the political role of the military in securing democratic gains in Zambia and Malawi.

Sishuwa Sishuwa

The unprecedented impact and pace of current environmental change calls for visions that counteract the dominant dystopian discourse and provide realistic examples of transformative changes that contribute to a better world, such as the already growing number of new initiatives, projects, practices…

Berta Martin-López

The present project investigates the intersection between Inspirational Fiction and the Bible. Inspiration Fiction offers theology in an easily accessible and attractively packaged form.

Lena-Sofia Tiemeyer

This project explores how deuteration - replacing certain hydrogen atoms in molecules with atoms of its heavier isotope, deuterium, can make natural medicines/products from Africa more stable and effective. Deuteration strengthens chemical bonds, helping drugs resist breakdown in the body without changing how they work. Although the method is widely used in modern pharmaceuticals and functional materials, it has not yet been applied to African traditional medicines or natural products, many of which degrade quickly during storage or use. Indeed, deuteration has rarely been used for drug discovery or development in Africa, including South Africa, despite its benefits. During my STIAS fellowship, i will identify unstable African compounds that could benefit from deuteration, design possible chemical modifications involving the incorporation of deuterium, and review deuteration-related research across Africa to better understand advances made with and barriers to using this chemistry more

Ross Jansen-van Vuuren

Cities Imagine if transforming African cities was not just about navigating complex challenges but about unlocking collective imagination.

Amollo Ambole

Global infectious disease research is largely structured around the logic of outbreaks: sudden events that demand rapid control, elimination, and return to “normal.” Yet in much of Africa, including Nigeria, many infectious diseases—such as malaria, Lassa fever, and cholera—are not exceptional events but enduring features of social, ecological, and economic life. This project proposes a conceptual and mathematical rethinking of infectious disease dynamics by shifting the focus from outbreaks to endemicity, understood as a condition of long-term co-existence rather than a temporary crisis. Using mathematical modelling as a central analytical tool, the project will examine how standard epidemiological frameworks implicitly assume stability, compliance, and institutional capacity that often do not hold in contexts of structural inequality. It will develop alternative modelling perspectives that better capture chronic instability, seasonal resurgence, multi-pathogen environments, and adapt

John Akanni

This project, the first book-length scholarly biography of legendary South African performer and political activist Miriam Makeba, chronicles Makeba’s life, her musical career, and her crucial role in the international anti-apartheid and Black Power movements.

Premilla Nadasen

This book project - Oversight Intimacies: Police Violence and Reform in Kenya - explores how police reform and accountability unfold in practice, focusing on Kenya as a critical site of analysis.

Tessa Diphoorn

‘Pambazuka: Dawn of the Kenyan State’ is a graphic novel that tells the story of a newly independent African nation and its relationship with the rest of the continent. It is a dramatized account based on actual people, historical events and locations. Most of the story is based in the virulent 1960s when countries that had just gained self-determination struggled with various challenges; from divergent political ideologies to dashing the hopes of citizens who expected a better life after the departure of colonial powers. The book also examines the fast changing society and culture that occurred at the time by embedding a fictional family as a backdrop to the unfolding events. It lays a rigid backgrounder for the reader, as well, by going back in time to the formation of the ancient African continent, early movement of human populations, the colonial period and eventual rise of nationalism. Content layout is made up of comic panels, full-page illustrations, speech balloons, text side b

Paul Kelemba

Spiders perform some of the most elaborate songs and dances in the animal kingdom, integrating movement, ornamentation, and vibratory song into coordinated displays. Historically, studies of their complexity were typically reduced to isolated, unchanging traits—ornaments, vibratory components, or solitary movements—rather than understood as the coordinated execution of behavior through time. How signals are sequenced, timed, and varied - how they are performed - is a central dimension of animal communication has remained conceptually underdeveloped. My research on multimodal courtship signaling in Schizocosa wolf spiders has repeatedly revealed that mating success depends not simply on what signals are produced, but on how they are executed: their timing, coordination, and dynamic structure. These findings point to a missing analytical framework. To address this, I propose to engage a body of scholarship that has long treated performance as its central object of study: specific African

Eileen Hebets

How can we imagine and design computational practices for sustainable pluriversal AI futures that enable diversity of voices, knowledges and epistemologies? Contemporary polycrises urgently call for technological alternatives to drive sustainable transitions that engage diverse local communities and knowledge systems. While discourses in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) call for responsible, ethical AI, these agendas are driven by Western values and hegemonic frameworks that do not align with marginal voices, lifeworlds and Global South epistemologies. The project develops a theoretical framework for Pluriversal AI Futures based in comparative research across local sites and communities in Namibia, South Africa and Denmark. Building on transdisciplinary approaches across anthropology and technology research, the project advances pluriversality in computational practices towards equitable and sustainable AI futures based on situated everyday practices in pluralistic society.

Rachel C. Smith

In mapping the now indispensable document for international travel—the passport— the project excavates its complex modern manifestations. Its import may appear to be intuitive, but betrays a multifaceted undergirding that demands unpacking, meaningful articulation and theorising.

Prem Poddar

Private law governs the everyday interactions between individuals and businesses—how we make agreements, resolve disputes, and secure basic goods.

François du Bois

Superabsorbent polymers (SAPs), such as sodium polyacrylate, are essential components in disposable nappies and other hygiene products due to their exceptional ability to retain moisture. Currently, these materials are produced from petroleum-based feedstocks and are largely imported in countries such as South Africa and Nigeria, contributing to high production costs and limited affordability. This project aims to develop a sustainable alternative by designing a production process for sodium polyacrylate using locally available resources, including sea brine and agricultural waste. Building on prior experimental work, the study will use computational modelling to simulate and optimise the conversion of renewable materials into key chemical intermediates and ultimately into SAPs. By integrating process design, simulation, and economic evaluation, the project will identify efficient and scalable production pathways. The goal is to provide a scientifically grounded framework for local man

Matthew Menkiti

During the STIAS fellowship, I propose to work on issues that are vital for probabilistic population projections for all countries, notably the projection of international migration by age and sex, and the projection of refugee and other forced migration flows.

Adrian Raftery

The rapid expansion of infrastructure across Africa has intensified the extraction of natural aggregates while simultaneously generating large volumes of quarry stone fines that are commonly treated as waste. This dual challenge reflects a broader structural inefficiency within construction material systems, where valuable secondary resources remain underutilized. Grounded in circular economy principles, this research programme seeks to reconceptualize quarry stone flours not merely as aggregate substitutes, but as strategic secondary resources capable of supporting low-carbon, resource-efficient concrete infrastructure in African contexts. The programme integrates materials science, civil engineering, and sustainability systems thinking to develop a coherent framework for the responsible upcycling of stone flours in concrete production. Experimental investigations on the physical, fresh-state, mechanical, and microstructural performance of stone flour-based concretes will be conducted

Blasius Henry Ngayakamo

Chemistry has reshaped almost every system that sustains—or threatens—life on Earth. The Janus face of chemistry is e.g., exemplified in its contribution and effect on food and population, energy and climate, and air and the environment. How chemistry could (and should) be reimagined to better serve humankind? How could chemistry be self-restrained to reduce complexity and potential harm to the environment and human health and could this restriction release creativity and innovation in the generation of new materials and chemicals of “use to humankind“, to quote Claude Louis Berthollet.

Lennart Bergström

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death worldwide including South Africa.

Tshepiso Makhafola

South Africa has since 1994 used a two-tier compensatory member PR system for National Assembly elections. However, it has since the mid-nineties been discussed if the system needs amendment to enable it to deliver the kind of accountable parliament South Africa so direly needs.

Jørgen Elklit