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2026
Moral Economies in African Muslim Societies
The project proposes to study and bring attention to contemporary moral economies in African Muslim societies that are overlooked.
Navigating Challenge
For South Africa a series of domestic and international shocks reflect a breaking international order. South Africa, like most of the world, has seen its national status transformed over the 80 plus years of the post Second World War political system.
Orchid or dandelion: network analysis of social and psychological factors
Mental illness leads to great suffering for affected individuals and is one of societies’ largest challenges.
Pan-African Powerhouses: The Interwoven Stories of Ghana and Tanzania
Positioned as fathers of Pan-Africanism on the continent, and hailed as heroes in the 21st century Nyerere and Nkrumah are two of the most highly regarded leaders of the independence era.
Regulation of programmed stop codon readthrough
My research lies within the Life Sciences, and is specialized around questions related to developmental biology, and how gene expression is regulated in normal and diseased contexts.
Remembering Deep Pasts for the Present: the Transformative Potential of Indigenous Memory Cultures in Australia and Globally
Australia is witnessing a surge of public works by Indigenous creatives across the arts that broadcast the message of ‘ever present’ and ‘always will be’.
Science and Technology in Indian Agriculture: History, Evolution and Emerging Challenges
This project is essentially a plan to write a book on the interrelationships between science, technology and agriculture in India, with specific reference to the challenges of sustainable development and climate change.
SLEEP: Minimalism And The Brain
This project explores intersections between minimalistic music and the neurobiology of sleep. The project draws its main inspiration from the piece SLEEP by post-minimalist composer Max Richter. SLEEP
Sound Knowledges of the Black World
This project investigates sound knowledges from Southern African cosmologies and investigate their deployment in black radicalism enacted within Pan-African and black internationalist contexts in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Sounds of life
The title of Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" equates life with sound, death with silence.
South African prison writing
This research project returns to and reconsiders the many representations of prison experience by political prisoners under apartheid, comparing them to new memoirs published since 2000.
Spiritual Place-Making in Contemporary Gardens
This project explores the growing synergies between gardening and spirituality.
Sympathetic Species: Kin and Kind in the Contemporary Global Novel
Two of the most important global crises of the current historical moment are migration and climate change, with the attendant biodiversity loss and other ecological problems.
Temporality and Technologies in South African Social Grant Life, 2020 and Beyond
In 2018, the South African government instituted a social assistance payment and registration system that it would administer through a public entity: the South African Post Office (SAPO).
Textless Speech-to-Speech translation for voice user interfaces using an oral language to assist low-skilled, low-literate people
Digital inclusion is a real concern when dealing with low-skilled, low-literate people who only speak oral languages.
The Expansion of West African Pidgin: Social and Linguistic Factors
West African Pidgin (Pidgin) is a group of related, mutually intelligible varieties that emerged from contact between English and African languages in coastal West Africa.
The Killing of the Dogs
This story of organised around and imaginary organised dog killing in a South African township during the period of resistance to apartheid oppression.
The politics of dress, gender and sexuality in Malawian popular art
This proposed study, which is an extension of my current research, sets out to examine the representations of the chitenje (a wrap-around cloth) in Malawian popular arts, as a site for examining how questions of gender, sexuality, class, and national belonging are negotiated.
The Power of Movement: Saharan perspectives on politics
Northwest Africa has recently been the site of a large variety of political movements.
The whiteness of Afrikaans literary feminism
In (Black Afrikaans poet) Ronelda Kamfer’s collection Chinatown(2019), she criticises canonical Afrikaans white women poets for their implied complicity with apartheid and continued white hegemony within the Afrikaans literary sphere.
This House Is Not for Sale
Current research explores land, home, and community in South Africa through a sociological lens.
Traumatic Intimacies
This project intervenes in the ‘decolonising trauma theory’ debate around the question of difference on the one hand, and what I call the artliness of the African literary text, on the other.
Waterworlding: More-than-human and more-than-digital
Technology providers from around the world are currently marketing digital water meters to households or communities with the promise of using water more efficiently and distributing it more fairly in the face of increasingly scarce drinking water resources and simultaneous population growth.
What would it take to make a virtual microbiology lab?
Computational Biology offers a valuable complement to complex experimental approaches to study infectious diseases like HIV and tuberculosis.
Women Cabinet Ministers in West Africa: Insights from The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone
Across the world cabinet ministers are significant political players and yet they are grossly under researched, in part because of a dearth of consistent and comparable data.
Women in mining frontiers in Africa: Exploring the diverse ways in which women’s lived experiences and livelihoods around sites of extraction are affected by mines
Scholarship on mining frontiers tends to be masculine in focus, covering topic such as the centrality of resource extraction in the colonial and post-colonial projects.
Word-prosody systems of the Creole languages of the Gulf of Guinea
Creole languages result from extreme linguitic contact between languages with distinct prosodic systems and often do not fit neatly into prototypical linguistic categories.
Writing the Definitive Book on How Insects Breathe
Insects are by far the most successful and diverse group of animals on the planet.
Zambia’s Shifting perceptions of China, the Chinese and Zambia-China Relations: From the state to the subnational
The project identifies three main epochs that demonstrate Zambia’s shifting perceptions of China the state, Chinese individuals and Zambia-China relations - from an era of intersecting solidarity to economic and political necessity.
2025
“S'obashaya Ngamatye”: Women and Sixty Years of the Armed Struggle in South Africa
This project brings together chapters written by 17 women former guerrillas from uMkhonto we Sizwe, the African National Congress military wing and the Azanian Peoples Liberation Army (APLA) and the Azanian National Liberation Army, the military wing of the Azanian Peoples Organisation (AZAPO).
A new History of the University and addressing the fundamental issue of the future for cinema studies in times of media convergence.
As former President of Stockholm University, stepping down on Jan 31 2025, my first concern will be to write a brief chapter to a new History of the University, to be published for its 150 year anniversary in 2028, where I have been asked to contribute with a brief summary of my experiences from 12 years of presidency.
A Socio-Historical Perspective on Organized Crime
The project investigated organized crime around the Atlantic seaboard from an unusual perspective – by tracing the migration of RussoPolish criminals to North and South America and to South Africa between 1881 (after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II) and 1914.
A three-dimensional view of exploding stars
A supernova explosion marks the spectacular end in the life of a massive star.
A two-prong approach – preventing head injury in rugby through law changes and effective tackle training.
The nature of the tackle in rugby exposes players to high risk of injury - specifically head injuries and concussions.
Affirmative Action: A Comparative Study
In dealing with diversity and difference, many countries have moved from the relatively passive idea of non-discrimination to a more pro-active strategy of affirmative action (AA).
Agro-food Regimes, Rural Poverty and Social Change in Southern Africa
Household food insecurity in rural Southern Africa has its roots in policies that supported large scale commercial farming by white settlers and the creation of spatially separate ‘reserves’ for black households.
AI-powered material optimisation for an environmentally conscious construction industry
The project intends to develop sustainable construction materials from waste like recycled plastics and natural fibers, reducing negative environmental impacts and promoting resource efficiency.
Artiste Rivalry, Digital Fandom and the Narratives of Oppositional Politics in Nigerian Hip-Hop
The place of fans in the sustenance of superstar visibility and the accompanying digital narratives of fandom have been understudied in Nigerian hip-hop.
Avian malaria and flavivirus prevalence in the savanna regions of South Africa
Avian malaria and flaviviruses are widely distributed vector-transmitted infections that can affect the fitness of birds and the later can also cause significant human disease.
Balancing social welfare and private maintenance: the alleviation of poverty in South Africa
South African (family) lawyers continue to focus on the private maintenance obligation as the primary instrument for alleviating poverty.
Beware of Bad Dogs, A Novel
A story set in contemporary Sierra Leone about a group of politicians who view themselves as leading a prosperous and progressive country versus those of the masses, the citizens, whose experiences differ.
Bringing unique data to wicked problems: developing health system models for equitable access to healthcare in sub-Saharan Africa
Injuries are one of the leading causes of death and disability in low- and middle-income countries, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.
Cell Reprogramming for Neurological Insights and Brain Repair
Mental disorders such as Schizophrenia affect up to 5 million in Africa and epilepsy is the most widespread neurological disorder on the continent.
Civil Aviation in East Africa 1946-1986 - Outline of a History
With this project I aim to outline the unwritten history of civil aviation in East Africa.
Clinical high-resolution phase-contrast x-ray medical imaging
X-ray imaging is a workhorse in the clinic due to its speed, low cost and relative simplicity.
Complex microbial communities: application of supply-demand principles to advance the science from describing diversity to explaining diversity
This project will involve collaboration with Jannie Hofmeyr (SU) on, amongst others the principles of supply and demand as driving force of metabolic activity, and incorporating them: 1) into existing experimental data sets to explore adaptive behavior amongst bacteria as a basis for the maintenance of microbial community function in environmental processes, and 2) a state-of-science review related to microbiological considerations for repository engineering and long-term safety of deep geological repositories of nuclear waste, as well as formulating recommendations for the way forward to predict the potential impact of microbial activity on the stability of these repositories.
Cooking increases the energy value of meat
Processing food extensively by thermal and nonthermal techniques is a unique and universal human practice.
Corporate regulation to address ESG sustainability
Over the past 25 years or so, large corporations have been under increasing pressure both to improve their performance on environment, social and governance (ESG) issues, and to report better on what they have (or haven’t) done.