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2026
A Continent Under House Arrest? Migration, Security, and Contested Sovereignties in the Sahara
Since the 2000s, the surveillance and coercion of individuals living in or travelling through the Sahara have been encouraged and implemented by international, European and African actors, often in blatant violation of international law.
Activist Language Scholarship: A Framework for Integrity
Our project joins sociolinguistics, philosophy of science, and research ethics in an extensive and close collaboration to explore the conditions of integrity in politically engaged scholarship.
African population exposure to extreme weather events under solar radiation modification (SRM) geoengineering
Climate change is causing extreme weather events, including droughts, floods, heat waves, and heat stress, which are threatening sectors such as food security, access to drinking water, and public health.
American DNA: Bioethics and the Excavation of Difference from the Human Genome
The resurgence of race in genomic research has renewed longstanding debates about the biological basis of human difference, raising urgent ethical questions about how science reanimates and recodes the meaning of race.
Assessing the impacts of climate change on ecosystem services in African montane ecosystems
The 2030 agenda for sustainable development by the United Nations emphasizes the need to protect the planet from degradation…… (UN, 2015).
Breaking the ice: how integrating cryogenic Electron Microscopy can overcome historical scientific isolation and enable local pharmaceutical and vaccine Development in South Africa.
With the award of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three pioneers in cryogenic electron microscopy, the world was awakened to the cutting-edge technology of 'cryo-EM'.
Children’s Mental Health and Human Rights Amidst Conflict: How Agency and Activism Shape Psychological Resilience and Survival Skills
This project explores how children living in conflict zones respond to violence, displacement, and systemic injustice—not only as victims, but as active agents of survival and resistance.
Classification conundrums: Classifying, re-classifying and de-classifying conflicts involving alliances, coalitions, umbrella groups and proxy’s
The proposed monograph aims explore the following constructs, ‘alliances’, ‘coalitions’, ‘umbrella groups’ and ‘proxy’s’ in the context of the law of conflict classification.
Contracts in South African Family Law
South African law increasingly relies on contracts to resolve disputes between family members and to address new practices like surrogacy and open adoptions within the family environment.
Cost of Testimony: Mediating and Marketing the Suffering of Distant Others
My project explores the aesthetics, ethics and politics of literary witnessing in five auto/biographical texts from the S-21 detention centre in Cambodia in relation to the politics of representation and the mediation of victims’ voices in witness literature from the cultural margins.
Degrees of becoming: Young women’s use of higher education as a symbolic resource in the making of selfhood
Transitions to adulthood are life-making projects—efforts to construct meaning and possibility even amid uncertainty.
Discipline of the Screen: Cinema and public order in South Africa
This project departs from the emergence of cinema in early 20th century South Africa, and its role in constituting a new public sphere around this form of leisure.
Division of labor, and the organization of work in the natural world
I am writing a book on division of labor in animal social groups, that also explores the broader question of how animal societies organize around work.
Epistemology and its discontents: Working as a psychologist in troubled times
This monograph project outlines the discipline of psychology’s complex relationship with human rights, acknowledging instances of complicity in injustice alongside its potential for liberation.
Establishing Criteria and Organizing guidelines for Advancing Standards in Biochar production and consumption using Renewable and Innovative Clean Alternatives
Biomass is the primary energy source for cooking and heating in many developing countries, including Ghana, where nearly 70% of the population rely on fuelwood, charcoal, animal droppings, and agricultural waste.
Ethnic Dilemma: The Politics of Inequality and Governance in Kenya
This project explores how ethnicity shapes governance and inequality in Kenya.
Euthanasia and Physician assisted suicide (PAS) from a regulatory perspective
This research proposal focuses on the regulation of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS), adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines legal—i.e., constitutional and criminal—analysis with empirical insights from the field of public governance and regulatory governance.
Generative AI to Strengthen Global Health Security
Infectious disease threats to individual and public health are numerous, varied and frequently unexpected.
Geophysical Fingerprinting of African Archaeological Sites: Developing a Multi-Method Framework for Characterizing Historical Clay and Mud Structures
This project aims to develop a comprehensive framework for characterizing traditional clay and mud-based structures in African archaeological contexts.
Global fertility industry and the Future of Humanity
With the expansion of reproductive technologies, the making of a baby has become an enterprise with a market for any, and all, related services.
How the ocean ventilates heat and carbon
A primary challenge to 21st century global climate predictability is understanding the ocean’s role as a heat and carbon sink or source to the atmosphere.
Human models to understand and treat autoimmune disorders
We will use different approaches to clarify what initiates an autoimmune disease and to devise better treatment.
Immunogenicity of multi-epitope transmission-blocking vaccine candidates based on Aedes mosquito saliva proteins
From January 2022 to August 2024, a total of 45,652 cases and 1492 deaths were reported in 12 African countries.
Inorganic nitrate, a dietary approach for prevention of cardiovascular disease
We study the chemical biology, physiology, and therapeutic effects of nitric oxide (NO) and related reactive nitrogen oxides.
Insights from the biology of the Cape honey bee: understanding nuances of social relations in social insects
The unfolding appreciation of the effects of the parthenogenetic production of female eggs from laying workers of Cape honey bee workers on social relationships in colonies has proved to be a rich source of ideas regarding the interplay between individual fitness and colony fitness.
Integration of structure/function predictions into the CERI emerging threat genomic surveillance pipeline
The Centre for Epidemiology Research and Innovation collects high-precision and timely data on emerging health threats by carrying out a world-class genomic surveillance effort.
Knowledge, Power, and Policy: Constructing a Political Economy of Innovation and Research in Post-Apartheid South Africa
South Africa has long been a leader in scientific research and innovation on the African continent.
Landscaping the Cape: “improvement”, the politics of visibility & the heritage e/affects of socio-ecological commoning, 1872 – 1948
This project builds on scholarship about landscape and memory in Cape Town by looking at how “nature” historically structured the material making of the cityscape, and the racially-heterogenous socio-natural commons that emerged in the city during the 20th century.
Moral Economies in African Muslim Societies
The project proposes to study and bring attention to contemporary moral economies in African Muslim societies that are overlooked.
Navigating Challenge
For South Africa a series of domestic and international shocks reflect a breaking international order. South Africa, like most of the world, has seen its national status transformed over the 80 plus years of the post Second World War political system.
Orchid or dandelion: network analysis of social and psychological factors
Mental illness leads to great suffering for affected individuals and is one of societies’ largest challenges.
Pan-African Powerhouses: The Interwoven Stories of Ghana and Tanzania
Positioned as fathers of Pan-Africanism on the continent, and hailed as heroes in the 21st century Nyerere and Nkrumah are two of the most highly regarded leaders of the independence era.
Regulation of programmed stop codon readthrough
My research lies within the Life Sciences, and is specialized around questions related to developmental biology, and how gene expression is regulated in normal and diseased contexts.
Remembering Deep Pasts for the Present: the Transformative Potential of Indigenous Memory Cultures in Australia and Globally
Australia is witnessing a surge of public works by Indigenous creatives across the arts that broadcast the message of ‘ever present’ and ‘always will be’.
Science and Technology in Indian Agriculture: History, Evolution and Emerging Challenges
This project is essentially a plan to write a book on the interrelationships between science, technology and agriculture in India, with specific reference to the challenges of sustainable development and climate change.
Sounds of life
The title of Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" equates life with sound, death with silence.
South African prison writing
This research project returns to and reconsiders the many representations of prison experience by political prisoners under apartheid, comparing them to new memoirs published since 2000.
Spiritual Place-Making in Contemporary Gardens
This project explores the growing synergies between gardening and spirituality.
The Expansion of West African Pidgin: Social and Linguistic Factors
West African Pidgin (Pidgin) is a group of related, mutually intelligible varieties that emerged from contact between English and African languages in coastal West Africa.
The Killing of the Dogs
This story of organised around and imaginary organised dog killing in a South African township during the period of resistance to apartheid oppression.
The Power of Movement: Saharan perspectives on politics
Northwest Africa has recently been the site of a large variety of political movements.
This House Is Not for Sale
Current research explores land, home, and community in South Africa through a sociological lens.
Trauma Theory and Childhoods in African Fiction
This monograph project intervenes in the timely debate around the ‘decolonisation’ of trauma theory by providing a revised understanding of the theory’s Euro-American foundations primarily dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis and northern scholarship on the issue of difference.
Waterworlding: More-than-human and more-than-digital
Technology providers from around the world are currently marketing digital water meters to households or communities with the promise of using water more efficiently and distributing it more fairly in the face of increasingly scarce drinking water resources and simultaneous population growth.
What would it take to make a virtual microbiology lab?
Computational Biology offers a valuable complement to complex experimental approaches to study infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis.
Women Cabinet Ministers in West Africa: Insights from The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone
Across the world cabinet ministers are significant political players and yet they are grossly under researched, in part because of a dearth of consistent and comparable data.
Zambia’s Shifting perceptions of China, the Chinese and Zambia-China Relations: From the state to the subnational
The project identifies three main epochs that demonstrate Zambia’s shifting perceptions of China the state, Chinese individuals and Zambia-China relations - from an era of intersecting solidarity to economic and political necessity.