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2020
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.
Developing a complexity science capable of solving practical, important, and urgent problems
The process of transforming agriculture in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is, especially for policymakers and decisionmakers, highly complex.
Directorial Authority and the Formation of the Modern Executive. The Governance of the African Chartered Companies
This is a proposal that seeks to advance a new interpretation of the history of the formation of ideas and institutions of the Executive branch of government.
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.
Generation, Democratization and Gang Violence in the Shanties: Haiti and South Africa
In this project, I seek an opportunity at STIAS to write several chapters of a book based on a comparative account of the nexus between violence and democracy in two shantytowns in Haiti and South Africa.
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.
Imitators and Innovators: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851-1921
Although African economic history is enjoying a renaissance, the branch of the subject represented by business remains relatively neglected.
Impact of sustainable intensification of food production on environment and human well-being
Africa, once considered the breadbasket of the world, is now strongly affected by problems with food insecurity and malnutrition.
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.
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.
Making Sense of Postgraduate Education in Context
Discourses related to globalisation privilege the role of knowledge workers in economic development.
Militarized Global Apartheid
This book explores how new regimes of labor and mobility control are taking shape across the global north in a militarized form that mimics South Africas history of apartheid.
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.
Open air discourse: romances of resistance in the Somali women’s struggle for independence
Mingling together historical record, myth and fiction, my aim is to write a play taking place in Mogadishu during the struggle for independence from Italy soon after the Second World War.
Restructuring settlements towards a healed future: The case of the Adam Tas Corridor initiative in Stellenbosch
Cities and larger towns are increasingly home to the majority of people, globally and 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.
Sexualities and (Dis)Abilities: (Re)Valuing Being Sexual Humans through Body Narratives
This study reads narratives that focus on the representations of (dis)abled bodies in sexually charged spaces in a bid to (re)value these bodies as they negotiate their humanity as well as their capacity to give and receive pleasure.
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.
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.
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 Changing Place of the Corporation in International Law (Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Legal Authority in a Global Context)
This is a team project within the Crossing Borders theme.
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 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 Law of Commissions: A Comparative Study of the Place of Commissions in Law and Governance.
The purpose of this work is to explore the role of Commissions; interrogate existing Commission discourses; examine the power of Commissions and their place in law and governance; investigate the global developments of their legal and socio-political dimensions; a process that involves a holistic approach that probes and unpacks Commissions in their complexity.
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
A critical investigation of post-apartheid life under a transformed legal, political and social order from the perspective of women.
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 story of Jabu Vilakazi – the Robin Hood of Soweto
The tension between personal experience, memory and historical fact is dynamic.
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: “A dictionary and reference grammar for ǀXam – a lost Khoisan language of the !Ui sub-family, formerly spoken by Sān communities in the early Cape and the interior of South Africa.”
This account of the |Xam language—from the !Ui branch of the TUU family—is envisaged as a contribution that will help to restore part of South Africa’sintangible cultural heritage.