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2021
Defining Humanity through Water and Sanitation
My project focuses on water and sanitation through the technologies that provide them, as a highly specific material index for abstract sensibilities about what constitutes a proper and dignified human life.
Ethiopia’s Challenge: Multiple Identities vs. Mono-Identity
Identity conflicts abound globally.
Pacing within sonic spaces: a psychology of music and work
Throughout history, the power of music to enhance productivity at work has been exploited.
Uneven Extinction: anxieties over life and death in times of crisis conservation
The current ‘sixth extinction’ event represents a major crisis for conservation as well as for global society more generally.
2020
Assessing marine mammal health to monitor impacts of ‘Operation Phakisa’- the South African Ocean Health Network (OHN)
Marine mammals are good indicators of ocean health, reflecting the state of the marine ecosystem.
Beyond Networks: an Organismic Systems Biology for the 21st Century
Biology is the science of life.
Beyond the Secular: Jacques Derrida and the Theological-Political Complex
Combining insights from political theology, postcolonial and critical race theories, this project interrogates the contemporary relation between religion and politics through an exploration of Jacques Derrida’s political thought.
Black Archives and Intellectual Histories
Black Archives and Intellectual Histories brings together a range of scholars from South Africa, the continent at large and the black diaspora whose work has transformed our thinking about black intellectual histories and archives.
Cartographies of Hospitality The Gendered, Racialised, and Classed Politics of Hosting
Hospitality has become an increasingly important theme in the contemporary discourse of migration.
Citizenship, International Justice, and the View from the South
The project is based primarily on a book manuscript under contract with Routledge Press: Citizenship in a Globalized World.
Consumerism and its dissidents: a social history of white South Africa, c 1950s -1970s
In general South African historiography has been marked by constant emphasis on apartheid, black resistance and formal Afrikaner politics has.
Continued work on the evolution of skin colour
While at STIAS, I plan to complete a long-standing data analysis of large bodies of archaeological, paleontological, and climatological data in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of skin colour in Homo sapiens for a joint project with Nina Jablonski.
Deciphering the biological consequences of geometrical isomerization of natural compounds.
Plants produce myriad of compounds with various biological properties.
Embodied Human Freedom
This research is a part of a larger project: a book on a philosophical account of human freedom, drawing strongly on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.
Federalism in Africa in Comparative Perspective
Federalism is arguably one of the less explored subjects in African political studies.
Fundamentals of laser powder bed fusion of metals
Additive manufacturing (AM) of metals (3d printed metals) is set to disrupt manufacturing industries through its many advantages including complexity and innovation in design, short lead times, minimal waste and distributed manufacturing potential.
Gender, Luxury, Waste: New Intersections in Southern Consumption Theory
This project will bring together original, recently completed empirical work examining cultural and media dimensions of three key facets of contemporary consumer culture in the global south, with a view to generating new theory relevant to consumption in the global south.
Gender, Sufi Ethics and Social justice in Islam
This project is based on completing a book manuscript focussed on Gender, Sufi Ethics and Social justice in Islam, which is under contract to Oneworld Academic Publications for their series Islam in the 21stCentury.
Global Humanities
This application is the first part of a larger long-term project on the establishment of an Academy of Global Humanities.
Hair: The Natural and Unnatural History of a Human Obsession
Hair is one of the most distinctive features of the human species and of individual people.
ICT-Based Platforms as a Driver of the Transformation of Africa's Smallholder Agriculture
For a number of years we have been observing the rapid growth and proliferation of ICT-based platforms for small farmers all over Africa.
Is Somaliland a Country? The Status of Institutional Objects in the Social Sciences
Somaliland is a democratically governed, autonomous region that defends its borders and issues currency in its own name.
Local media: Western media in a context of orality in Africa
This book project in four parts intends to study how people, coming from a centuries-old orality, act in a context of copyright introduced by colonial and postcolonial authority.
Local soil knowledge: a tool for sustainable agricultural systems in Madagascar
Local soil knowledge is an important source of information when designing sustainable agricultural strategies.
Making Sense of Postgraduate Education in Context
Discourses related to globalisation privilege the role of knowledge workers in economic development.
Mobility solutions as a South African urban integrator: the Adam Tas Corridor test-bed case
Development planning for the Adam Tas Corridor in Stellenbosch has been undertaken by a multidisciplinary group, including local and provincial planning authorities, urban developers, transport specialists and various Stellenbosch based interested and affected parties, including STIAS, Stellenbosch University and a number of Stellenbosch based businesses.
Occupational Health and Well-being in the Performing Arts in South Africa: The formation of an interdisciplinary Performing Arts Health network led by the universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria
This project aims to consolidate and develop a national Performing Arts Health network led by Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria for interdisciplinary scholarly activity in the field of performing arts health in South Africa.
Scientific persona and internalization of research – the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in creating scientific and scholarly identities and promoting academic careers in early twentieth century Sweden
American philanthropy, notably the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), played an important role in the internalization of research in Europe after the First World War.
Single polarized-photon emitters based on III-nitride pyramidal quantum dots for quantum cryptography
The modern society is reliant on digital communication, at present experiencing an immense expansion, but the communication should also be secure.
Small Ocean History
The Small Ocean Project explores how a historical focus on the intimate and ‘everyday’ lives of mobile subjects, within their simultaneously cosmopolitan and parochial worlds and intimate networks for transnational capital accumulation, can help us understand south-south globalization and its effects on Islam, capitalism and international regimes, around the turn of the 20th century.
Splitting Dynamics and Quantum Hydrodynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates
Since the realisation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) a couple of decades ago, there have been intense works on the quantum gas field, aiming mostly at unravelling the quantum properties of matter at large scale and to experimentally mimic the behaviour of physical systems that cannot be directly explored.
Stellenbosch innovation district
The clustering of economic activity has brought economic benefits in the past - London for finance, Hollywood for film, San Francisco for tech.
Text, Human Rights and pandemics: Being human in times of contagion
Partly prompted by and responding to the effects of Covid-19, our project takes a long-shot view of text, contagion, and ideas of the rights-bearing human over time.
The ambiguity of English as an academic lingua franca: Perspectives from South Africa
Grounded in linguistic anthropology, the primary objective of this project is to provide a nuanced ethnographic account of how the sociocultural ambiguity of English as an academic lingua franca is one of its most defining features in the South Africa education system.
The Disorder Project
The Disorder is a body of work developed under the rubric of an ongoing project namely, To Be King.
The Impact of Social Media on Science Communication
Social media are now a major part of our daily life.
The impact of technological change on developing countries
The accelerating capability of computing power and development of artificial intelligence poses new questions regarding the future of work.
The Morality of Martiality: Beyond Good and Evil in Liberation Struggles
This is an interdisciplinary research project on the morality of martiality.
The politics and poetics of old age: Drawing on Law and Literature to assess the (cultural) legitimacy of African Union norms on the rights of older persons
The African Union in January 2016 adopted a treaty – the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Older Persons – dealing with the rights of older persons in Africa.
The theoretical alignment of Bayesian statistics and cumulative prospect theory
The focus of this research is combining Bayesian statistics, in particular Bayesian data analysis, with utility theory.
The UN and its Discontents
The project aims to explore little-studied dynamics among and behaviour of UN member states and staff members that constrain the organization, and render it resistant to meaningful reform and vulnerable to achieving sub-optimal results, against two possible overall hypotheses:Hypothesis 1: The UN’s underperformance is rooted in structural tensions: a) between sovereignty-based principles and between expectations that the Secretary-General needs a degree of policy autonomy; b) between a UN that relies on member states for funding and backing and a UN that is tasked to uphold set of universal human rights norms; and c) tensions over the nature of UN legitimacy.
Unsettled Futures: Precarity and the Project of Post-Apartheid in the Countryside
This research focuses on South Africa’s democratic period and in particular on the state ambition- which I call the post-apartheid project— to provide a better life for all its citizens.
Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries
The study of popular culture in Africa illustrates that ordinary African residents in urban settings use their local specificities to create popular forms of African cultural production that respond in innovative ways to global cultural imports.
Using a projectivized approach towards advanced studies in mental health research and developing graduateness among mental health students
Postgraduate students could benefit from joining a projectivized research project, as this could be helpful to focus research objectives early in their career.
White Women Engaging Black Lives Matter: Problematizing Solidarity in a Time of Identity Politics
The brutal police killing of George Floyd in America on 25 May 2020 has led to global mass protest action through the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement against police brutality and other institutionalized forms of violence against Black people.
Working title:Elusive Spring
An award-winning journalist working for a British-owned newspaper, investigates a series of killings that appear to be politically-related; the more he does so, the more he and his associates are threatened, and he has to negotiate numerous attempts to undermine his credibility with the planting of fake news, large sums of money being transferred into his account, and the odd honey trap.
Writing on Water: experiments with historical forms through Daniel Morolong and Joseph Denfield's photographs of the East London coast
The project aims to unpack the multiple ways that photographs depicting the sea can be utilised for formal experimentation and disruption in history writing.
Xnau-Xnau⁀GE@MP
The core of our investigation will be generative, site-based investigation into our music improvisation, both as practice and as reflexive engagement.