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2017
“Dementia: a growing problem in South Africa and the world”
Prosperous people live longer and old age carries a high risk of dementia, a condition that is so far neither preventable nor curable.
Aid Effectiveness and Policy Coherence for Development: Donor Policies and Practices in Comparative Perspective
This research project explores the extent to which donor countries’ aid and non-aid policies work together in the interests of development, as well as the extent to which donors work with each other and recipient governments.
Asymmetric (Trans)Constitutionalism beyond Eurocentrism and Post-Colonialism
The research deals with the asymmetrical political relations in the world society and their impact on transconstitutional entanglements between legal orders.
Axis and Revolution
The themes of the collection Axis and Revolution, my fourth book of poetry, range from poetry as autobiography to the contemporary legacy of slavery, a topic that has engaged my critical as well as creative writing.
Bridging between the Physical and Biological Worlds
Living and non-living systems are strikingly different.
Cafe de Move On Blues
In Cafe de Move On Blues I plan to look at people like me, both English and Afrikaans whites, across the country, in an attempt to say who they are (and who they think they are) and how they react to life in the new South Africa.
Climate Change and the Emerging Disease Crisis: An Existential Threat to Technological Humanity
The emerging infectious disease (EID) crisis encompasses all pathogens affecting humans and the species upon which we depend for survival and socio-economic development.
Comparative Rebel Governance in Uganda: The influence of rebel objectives on rebel government structure — comparing take‐over to secession
Rebel groups often create governments when they control territory during civil war.
Comparative regionalism: The political economy of regional security organizations
After the end of the Cold War a respacing of international politics has begun – a new world order is emerging that is increasingly described as multipolar.
Controlling Landscapes and Bodies
During my time at STIAS I will collaborate with Stellenbosch and Cape Town faculty in both the humanities and the sciences to look at the positioning and chronology of Egyptian rock art in the Eastern Sahara in order to establish whether the animal or human images shown reflect changes in the environment and how it was manipulated, and ways in which this can be proven.
Creating a Liberal British Empire: Histories and Legacies
This book will address the question of how liberal society attempts to reconcile empire to its values and principles.
Devil With Blue Eyes
Devil With Blue Eyes is a novel of dislocation that seeks to explore and expose the rise of xenophobia in South Africa.
Dying to forget: History, memory and the intergenerational transfer of trauma in South Africa
THIS project is about the discipline of history and the intergenerational transfer of trauma in South Africa.
Hiraeth (a novel)
The creative project, a novel with the working title ‘Hiraeth’, is conceived of as a mythopeoic journey story undertaken by nine young misfits from different parts of the world, attending a private boarding school in Kenya, who are haunted by a common dream and the persistent summons of a honey-guide.
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Meeting Long Term Challenges
Professor Ian Goldin is the Director of the Oxford Martin School and Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford.
Jazz Life
This is a book in progress replete with personal incident and an appreciation of South African jazz history and culture, musicians and the music played.
Law and World
The terms globe and world are used interchangeably in the contemporary discussion about legal globalizations.
Life in the transients
This project will explore a new theory of adaptation that I have termed Life in the Transients (LIT).
Mad Men: A South African Media History The aspirational syntax of men’s magazines: A South African media history, 1910 to the present
Men’s magazines had their official start in South Africa in 1910 with the inception of publications aimed at asserting the continued role of the Empire in establishing a benchmark of good taste.
On the charge accumulation and ion exchange in PEDOT electrodes
Supercapacitors are devices that reside on the border between capacitor technology and battery systems and are utilized in transportation and infrastructure applications.
Participatory Realism
Recently Cabello (arXiv:1509.04711) introduced a taxonomy of quantum interpretations with regard to what they attempt to say of reality.
PostAfricanism vs Fanonism
Although the current global age in its most crucial structural orientations, has turned viscerally anti-Fanonian, Fanon remains, especially among the intellectual left, a key intellectual and moral authority still sponsoring the seeming perpetuation of the anti-colonial/decolonial outlook not just in Africa but in the rest of the Third World.
Reservoir computing of (African) bird song
South Africa is one of the top destinations in the world for bird watching.
Scaling the drivers and consequences of biodiversity change
Biological diversity is intrinsically scale-dependent, and understanding its scaling properties may help us better manage and conserve it.
Sealing the Female Body Before Marriage: Cultural Debates about Hymeneal Signs
This project asks how reflections on the female body part called the hymen or maidenhead in early modern English texts (produced from 1500-1700) can illuminate modern debates about the set of modern surgical practices called hymenoplasty.
Self, Autonomy, Authority and Law: The Challenge of ‘Leaky Bodies’
The unity, integrity, health and prospects of collectives such as states, nations and societies are often imagined in terms of the individual human body.
Sex and Sexuality in Africa: A Brief History
Since at least the 1980s, historians of Africa have produced a rich and nuanced scholarship on sex and sexuality on the continent.
Springer Handbook of Water Resources Management
Water is a limited resource. Water and sanitation are human rights.
States of Terror: History, Theory, Literature
After 9/11 The USA declared war on an emotion.
Symbolic Classification
The project enquires into the role of symbolic classification in the construction and reproduction of inequality.
Systematic generation of an update of the ongoing studies on the new BTK inhibitors
BTK is a cytoplasmic protein-tyrosine kinase, whose corresponding gene was isolated in the early 1990s.
Texts/Forms and Transformations: A Poetics of the African Imagination
African narratives in both their traditional and contemporary phases apparently extend or re-stage tendencies previously encoded in folklore.
The Free Peoples Festivals: exploring cross-border relationships and interactions in the fostering of alternative music communities in South Africa
This project forms part of a five year research project that is investigating the role that alternative music communities in South Africa played to imagine and create a social order different from the system of apartheid.
The Functional Structure of Brain Asymmetries: A Unified Theory
Hemispheric asymmetries play an important role in almost all cognitive functions.
The Performance of Democracies (2)
Democracy as an overall model for how societies should be governed must be seen as a remarkable success.
The scorpion chemosensory organs (project 1) & Biological contexts of pain perception and suffering in experimental animals (project 2)
1. The scorpion chemosensory organs have a number of unusual properties, making them an intriguing research object for neurobiologists.
Ubuntu: a Meta-norm for the West?
Ubuntu is an Nguni word that covers a broad semantic field to signify a sharing that connects humans and typifies all right thinking.
Unwilling Umma: Histories of Exile and Islam Across the Indian Ocean
This project is an exploration of the life and memories associated with three key saints of the local Capetonian scene, and most notably Tuan Guru, set against a larger story of forced labour and exile in the Indian Ocean from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries.
World Literature, Minor Languages, and the Art of Translation: The Example of Afrikaans
By examining a number of literary works which were published in both Afrikaans and English in the past 25 years in the context of recent studies of the question of translation and world literature, this project will attempt to answer such questions as: Does translation of literary works into major languages represent a danger for the future of minor languages?
2016
“Historical geography’s contributions to understanding South Africa.”
Part of a larger study evaluating the contributions of historical geographers to understanding the settler colonies of the British Empire, the work at STIAS will focus on historical geography in South Africa, beginning with the work of NC Pollock and S Agnew (1963), and focusing in particular on the contributions of AJ Christopher, Professor Emeritus at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, who published a number of atlases, books, and articles on the development of the country and its human geography during the apartheid era.
Alienation, protest and the idea of a manifesto
The principal aim of this period of writing and research is to complete a chapter from a short book, tentatively entitled Marx@Marikana: Reading Marx in South Africa today.
Contemporary law: the dialectic of unity and plurality
The simultaneous unity and plurality of law was a central topic for Hans Kelsen.
Distributed Renewable Economy for Africa’s Transformation
Human history over the millennia has been shaped by major social transformation processes.
DOHaD and SDGs: Moving towards Early Implementation
The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease & Sustainable Development Goals: Moving Towards Early ImplementationThe Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) paradigm provides us with a new and exciting way to think about causation of illness while at the same time providing us with both personal and population-level instruments for avoiding harm and promoting health.
Global Citizenship and the Practice of Being Human. South African Visions and the legacy of Enlightenment
This project addresses the idea of global citizenship and common humanity in South Africa today.
The use of shear wave elastography in patients with homozygous beta thalassemia
Patients with homozygous beta thalassemia have complex clinical complications due to the need for blood transfusions and iron overload.
We Don't Need Another Hero
In a 2008, post-Polokwane missive to ANC president, Jacob Zuma, declaring his refusal to campaign for the African National Congress (ANC) in the upcoming 2009 general election, recently-deposed South African President Thabo Mbeki famously declared:… I find it strange in the extreme that today cadres of our movement attach the label of a cult of personality to me, and indeed publicly declare a determination to kill to defend your own cause, the personal interests of the personality, Jacob Zuma!
Wildness
In this project, I engage with the concept of ‘wildness’, initially in the very problematic ways in which it is often used, but then more substantially in its possibilities for (re)thinking human, plant and animal identities, including in ways which decentre the human.