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2017
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.
Prevalence of phytoparasitic nematodes and damage levels on vegetable crops in the southwest Ethiopia: An approach towards development of a sustainable nematode management
Various vegetable crops are grown in the southwest part of Ethiopia.
Removal of pollutants from drinking water by clay minerals using metal oxide nanoparticles
Contamination of drinking water with chemical and biological pollutants is a serious problem of the present century.
Reservoir computing of (African) bird song
South Africa is one of the top destinations in the world for bird watching.
Retrospective and Prospective Reflections on Higher Education in Africa
The paper begins with a historical background attempting to provide an African wide perspective unifying the often fragmented contributions of North Africa, South Africa and the rest of the continent.
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 African Resistance Movement: A Cultural History
This project (and the book that will follow) is a cultural history of the ARM, the African Resistance Movement, which despite the elevation of its name, was a group of no more than fifty mainly liberal , anti - communist idealists who formed an underground movement in South Africa in 1960 and embarked on a campaign of sabotage aimed at government installations (pylons and railway lines).
The challenges and options in relation to water security for groundwater-dependent urban settlements located in fragile regions of Kenya
Many towns in Kenyas arid and semi-arid lands (and to a lesser extent, sub-humid zones) rely largely or exclusively on groundwater for public and private water supply.
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 Effects of Race
The STIAS Effects of Race project project will address major gaps in our knowledge on race thinking and racialism.
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 public sphere in African political thought
This research project aim is to contribute to the quest for a viable political philosophy for contemporary Africa.
The Revolution of Information Economics: The Past and the Future
The economics of information has constituted a revolution in economics, providing explanations of phenomena that previously had been unexplained and upsetting longstanding presumptions, including that of market efficiency, with profound implications for economic policy.
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.
The Theory and Practice of Social Transformation through the Arts (Being Human Today theme)
The world over and across time, the arts remain vitally important in fostering resilience and creating channels for reconciliation after conflict.
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.
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
“Brighter Futures” through Health Promotion and Health Equity
There is robust evidence that health promotion in the school setting can increase children’s knowledge and change their choice of health related behaviors for the better.
“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.
“Sustainable Cities in South Africa: A Legal Appraisal”
The 11th of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals adopted on 25 September 2015 (the new sustainable development agenda), focuses on the pursuit of cities that are inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable.
“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!
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.
Assessing the potential impact of agriculture on the biogeochemistry of a pristine wetland, the Okavango Delta
The Okavango Delta, Botswana is a World Heritage Site and an international treasure.
Biotechnology and Legal Regulation: Personal Freedom, Risk Management and Human Dignity
The regulation of biotechnology is determined by a number of often conflicting legal values and social-economic interests.
Cannon’s cats and Freud’s dream metaphor insight carry the keys to much human thought (and action)
Sigmund Freud in 1899, reported that the dream metaphor often provides the key to understanding the psychological origin of emotional distress (‘neurosis’), and Walter Cannon in 1915 elucidated the body’s response to emotional stress in cats, called the ‘fight or flight response’.
Christianity, modernity and the politics of homosexuality in Africa
This project examines the complexity and multiplicity of Christian contributions to politics of homosexuality and LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights in Africa.
Commemorating Painful Pasts through Performative Practices
The 19th and the beginning of the 20th century have left a dark legacy behind: world wars, genocides, civil wars, dictatorships and terrorist attacks with millions of people tortured, persecuted, displaced, dead, or disappeared without a trace.
Complexity and Anticipation
Complexity is possibly the most relevant scientific idea that emerged during the past decades.
Complexity and emergent properties in the spider’s webs and silks
Spider webs are superb examples of functional structures that emerge as the animal builds her web.
Constitution-building in Africa: Decentralisation and constitutionalism in Africa
Under the broad theme of constitution-building in Africa, the focus of this project will be on the issue of decentralisation and constitutionalism in Africa.
Crime and Citizenship
Witnessing the large-scale displacement and conditions of statelessness in the wake of the Second World War, political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the evocative phrase the right to have rights, arguing that the fundamental right, from which all other rights sprung, was the right to membership of a political community.
Critical Illegibility, Blackness and Scoring Dangerous Freedoms
My project examines the possibility of reconfiguring conventional literary analytic practice by crafting critical approaches which are less invested in rendering texts ‘transparent’ than in approximating, embracing and extending the transgressive energies and insights of creative texts.
Dangerous Denial: An Exploration of Major Endocrine Disruptors
Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with the body’s hormonal system, adversely affecting reproduction, neurology and immunology in humans and animals.
Differentiated Access: Water, Citizenship and Politics
Global water policy highlights the need to extend affordable and safe water to underserved communities, in addition to fostering participatory water governance.
Distributed Renewable Economy for Africa’s Transformation
Human history over the millennia has been shaped by major social transformation processes.