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2019
'How Disposed Of': Liberated Africans and the Waiting Space of Freedom 1807-1930
This project is the fruition of twenty-seven years of research on the significance of the Liberated Africans, those rescued from the holds of slave ships and dhows in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean between 1808 and 1888, with an aftermath that continued into the 1930s.
“Renascent Africa: Cultural Nationalism, Decolonisation, the Nationalist Movement, and Trans-Continental collaborations: The example of Nigeria and South Africa.”
The idea of a renaissance suggests new consciousness, new attitudes, and values that undergird a new era of human development.
A History of the Nighttime in South Africa
This project is a book-length study of the history of the nighttime in South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
A Place to Call Home: A comparative study of the urban housing boom in Luanda and Nairobi
Despite their very different political and economic contexts, both Luanda and Nairobi have experienced housing booms and urban property bubbles over the last fifteen years.
African International Courts
In the course of the last decades, several international courts have been established, either within the African Union [AU], or within the Regional Economic Communities [RECs], and even within some smaller sub- regional organizations.
An Emerging Middle Class, Changing Mortuary Practices, and a New Funeral Economy in Northern Ghana
My current research project looks at recent dramatic changes to funerals among the Dagara of northwestern Ghana.
An Ordinary of Agony. The Social and Political Production of Superfluous People
The present research proposal aims to work on an anthropology of misfortune in Cameroon by describing and analyzing critically various forms of malevolence in media narrative in Cameroon.
Black Swans in Public Administration: Rare Organizational Failure with Severe Consequences
The subject of the project is organizational failure in public administration with severe consequences for the physical integrity of humans.
Bodies and/as Texts: Representing queer on screen in contemporary Africa
The body is an assemblage of not only the physical and the material.
Cancer treatment by manipulation of mitochondria
Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and to reduce this societal and economic burden new treatment options will be needed.
Coetzee, Kentridge, and the Computer: Automation and the Arts in South Africa
This study explores the reciprocal relationship between technology, politics, and the arts.
Complexity and the Shift in Modern Science
Science has shifted in the last 120 years from a grounding in the Enlightenment ideas of formalism, determinacy, rationality, and stasis; to a new grounding in organicism, indeterminacy, contingent behavior, and evolutionary openness.
Decolonizing Africa: A Feminist Perspective
The main aim of this project is to develop a resource that moves legal education away from the conventional teaching which focuses on the black letter of the law and perpetuates a colonial, hierarchical, and decontextualized understanding.
Digital Capitalism
This project is about digital capitalism, and more specifically, the emergence of a new gig economy associated with the rise of new platform business models such as Uber, Upwork, TaskRabbit, Helpling, and others.
Experimental Protocols for First-person Accounts
The experimental works conducted during the past 15 years by Albertazzi and others have shown that phenomenal qualities subjectively perceived are not explicable by third person accounts.
From one to many: parallels between the origins of multicellularity and social behaviour
When a unit of description makes way for a second unit that consists of many members of the first, the notion of individuality, which initially referred to the ‘one’, now refers to the ‘many’.
Global Corporations, Accountability and International Law
This research would form part of a larger project which aims to produce a new conceptual understanding of the relationship between global corporations, states, state law and international law.
Glory (working title)
A multi-generational family drama told through different periods of Zimbabwe’s history.
In/appropriate Personae: Contemporary Culture and the Politics of Appropriation
This project, a prospective monograph entitled In/appropriate Personae: Contemporary Cultural Production and the Politics of Appropriation, seeks to examine the growing awareness of the politics of representation and ethics of appropriation in contemporary culture, especially in relation to depictions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.
Interrogating Women’s Pathways into and Engagement with Political Power in Africa: A Comparative Study of Uganda and South Africa
Over the past few decades the presence of women in government also called descriptive representation has increased significantly because of a greater acceptance of quotas or reserve seats for women.
Law, Kinship, and the Formal Processes of Middle-Class Reproduction in Johannesburg, South Africa
This project investigates how legal and bureaucratic processes mediate inheritance in South Africa, as a window into the formal institutional dimensions of middle-class reproduction.
Luanda is not Paris: a situated epistemology of Southern Urbanism Theory
This project for a book titled In the skin of the city: Luanda, or the dialectics of spatial transformation examines the process of historic formation and transformation of Luanda, the capital city of Angola.
Memorializing Struggle: Dynamics of Memory, Space and Power in Post-Liberation Africa
In post-liberation societies, memorialization and commemoration can occur at a grand, national scale, often being linked to heroic freedom fighters or critical revolutionary turning points.
Migration Vulnerability and Access to Social Protection
The project concerns the availability, adequacy and access to social protection of three selected vulnerable migrant categories, i.
Mineral Wealth and Distributive Struggles on the Platinum Belt, South Africa
This project explores distributive struggles on the platinum belt in South Africa.
Multi-class families, regional disparities and the emergence of middle classes in Africa
Drawing on my own fieldwork in Ghana as well as secondary sources on West Africa, but also other African countries, this project will explore two challenges in particular.
My Voice in Contemporary Art Music
I experience contemporary art music as a marriage of two musical cultures, Kiganda of the Baganda in Uganda and the western art music, which have shaped my musical performance and creativity for the last 40 years.
Patriotic Thrift: Savings Campaigns and Imperial British Identity in World War II and After
During the second world war, savings campaigns mobilized the people of the British empire and commonwealth, whether men, women, or children, to make public, individual investments in the war effort.
Planetary Prejudices: Race, Migration, and Technology in the New Global Order
Taking racism as the engine of capitalism, the study of racial capitalism offers a potent framework for understanding how racism structures modern life.
Political culture in Africa and post-communist Europe: towards explaining the logic of democratic underdevelopment
The strategic aim is to prepare a book for publication that describes and explains the vicissitudes of democracy and underdevelopment in Africa and Eastern Europe by method of comparison.
Prediction and reversibility of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes in black South African women
This project aim to study mechanisms underlying the very high occurrence of type 2 diabetes in black South African Women.
Producing the self through play online
The notion of playing with identity through physical appearance is particularly evident in society.
Protein deficiency, sarcopenia and cardiometabolic risk in an older urban black South African population: A cross-sectional feasibility study
South Africa (SA) is a low-middle income country (LMIC) with an ageing population and increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCD).
Reading black middle-classness
For this project I am reading the burgeoning publication of essays that tackle black middle-classness and related aspects such as masculinities, femininities and race - indeed, intersections of these.
Short Stories of the World: Africa
This intended collection will include around 20 African short stories which will be translated into Icelandic.
Southern imaginaries, or, thinking from the South
At a time when the focus of economic development is often the so-called Global South, yet when countries of the north continue to grow in geopolitical dominance, this interdisciplinary project offers a series of cultural, historical, and literary reflections on southness.
The Anticipatory Perspective: What Next?
An anticipatory behavior is a behavior that ‘uses’ the future in its actual decision process.
The Negatives: A Novel
The Negatives is a conceptual novel about a photographer adrift in contemporary America who is forced to confront the ethics of her practice in a moment at which the very medium of her art has reached a state of volatility, mutability, and impermanence.
The Politics of Education Reform in Middle-Income Countries
A growing scholarly consensus views high quality education as essential for sustained and equitable development.
The Role of Laws, Policies, and Constitutional Rights in Advancing Gender Equality in Africa and Globally
In every country, women earn less than men; in all but five, women are less likely to have paid employment.
Theological ethics in the intersection of moral psychology and sociology
There is a long-standing debate in theological ethics (as well as in moral philosophy) between, on the one hand, theories that thinks of ethics as a form of decision theory that can overcome the contingency and arbitrariness of the human body (emotions and intuitions) and the socio-historical context, and, on the other hand, understandings of ethics that sees ethics as an embodied practice embedded in traditions, narratives, social practices, institutions, and concerned with moral formation.
Towards a Politics of Singularity, or Beyond Identity Politics
Cutting across the boundaries of recent political theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, this project aims to show that the link between one human being and another, the social bond, consists of a traumatic encounter.
Translation of the Amharic Novel, Tobiya (1907) into English
African-language literatures have long and deep histories in their societies but take place within fenced literary spaces and typically are unavailable to world literature audiences.
Untermenschen: Nietzsche on slavery – and what it means to be human
Does modern capitalism produce new forms of slavery?
Urban informality and middle-class aspirations in South Africa and Kenya
This project will take its point of departure in field work carried out by Bodil Folke Frederiksen and myself in two urban slum areas in South Africa and Kenya from the mid-1990s onwards.
Women’s Associations in a Pastoralist Society in Transformation: Implications for Gender-Based Livelihood Improvement Policies in Benin
How does the organization of women transform gender relations and living standards of Fulani women in pastoralist communities of northern Benin?