Projects

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.

Stephen Gelb

The proposed study is a book length project on the ideologies that underpin discourses of resistance to the militarisation of relations between African countries and Western imperialists.

Isaac Mwinlaaru

The proposed project seeks to explore how retraction and recantation take shape in experimental writing of the 20th and 21st Century. Its guiding motif is the palinode: a literary-philosophical form used to reject one’s own previous writing. Out of this conjunction of the poetic and the philosophical, I hope to build a conceptual framework for two types of literary retraction.

Rick De Villiers

Why do some individuals or societies transcend a divisive past and why do some remain prisoners of their own past?

This long-term project, with it’s focus on affect, particularly melancholy, shame and rage, is located in a feminist decolonial framework and is aimed at disrupting gender, raced and other entangled binaries and associated violences.

Lou-Marié Kruger Tamara Shefer

The domestication of many animal species was a key element in the development of human societies.

The advent of the electronic area has opened new ways to conceptualise and to organise knowledge.

Dogon Muslims and pagan saints are key figures emblematic of the dramatic social transformations Mali has witnessed since the mid-20th century.

Benjamin Soares

During the past decade, there has been a lot of interest among evolutionary biologists in ecological niche-based) speciation processes, under the scientific umbrella of The ecological theory of adaptive radiations.

This project explores the intensification of interest in culture as the basis for new forms of development and the assertion of new rights.

The project has as its goal to advance a comparative law analysis between Colombia and South Africa in terms of legal interventions to counteract or prevent environmental destruction and its particular gendered effects.

Helena Alviar GarcÍa

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer among women worldwide.

Daniel Aili

The health risks associated with the presence of toxic metals in water require the use of highly selective and sensitive techniques for accurately monitoring their presence and removing them to ensure public health safety.

Ismaila Emahi

Any serious study of the Indic ideas of freedom must begin with acknowledging the centrality accorded to order in a polity.

During this last half century of global expansion in higher education, attention focused on the population of first-generation students: those whose parents had not been to university.

Jennifer Case

During his South African years (1893-1914), Mohandas Gandhi began fashioning his world-changing ideas on satyagraha/‘passive resistance’.

Gender based violence and sexual violence in specific have reached unprecedented levels in countries in the Global North and South.

Amanda Gouws

Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) is an aggressive type of blood cancer that requires life-long therapy.

Göran Karlsson

This application is the first part of a larger long-term project on the establishment of an Academy of Global Humanities.

John Noyes Bo Stråth Brendon Nicholls

The growth of global news media presents a fundamental challenge to the theory and practice of media ethics.

The proposed research will investigate the political role of the military in securing democratic gains in Zambia and Malawi.

Sishuwa Sishuwa

Emotion is part of history, in the way we live, and experience it.

Sarah Godsell

A growing concern in HIV research is the emergence of drug resistant strains of the virus.

Informal settlements (slums) are rapidly growing in the developing world.

Victoria Namuggala

Higher education globally is undergoing significant transitions due to increasing levels of diversity amongst student populations.

Arlene Archer Anders Björkvall Zach Simpson

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality and amounts to about a third of all global deaths.

The project is a comparative study of the South African-born, now Australian writer J.

Elleke Boehmer

The proposed project looks into the activities of the Instituut vir Volksmusiek at Stellenbosch University.

Rebekka Sandmeier

The project will analyse three factors in play: a national project of post-colonial recovery from distributive injustice, prominently including land reform; express constitutional protection for property rights; and a constitution whose other main features bring it recognisably within the broad historical tradition of liberal constitutionalism.

This project consists in writing a monograph about the irreducible and pervasive complexity of the natural world (the biological world, in particular), and about the importance of becoming increasingly aware of this intrinsic complexity, in continuous development and evolution (more so when combined with the artificial worlds recently created by humans), if we are to handle adequately future challenges for science and society.

Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo

This project thinks through the space of the lift as urban affective infrastructure in Johannesburg over the 20th century.

Bridget Kenny

Over the past two centuries, the dominant view in social science has been that the modern world shows a pattern of linear development in which all positive trends go upward in more or less linear fashion (albeit perhaps at an uncertain speed), and that therefore over time discrepancies between the leaders and the laggards are overcome, toward a relatively homogenized world.

Traditionally, teachers of reading and writing have assumed texts as monolingual and monomodal.

Developing a (mathematical) model suitable for the integration of the different levels of biological research (sub-molecular, molecular, organisms, populations) in one framework.

The spread of most diseases is strongly affected by the migrations of populations due to wars, natural disasters or prevailing economic circumstances.

Jacek Banasiak

This book-length project is tentatively titled Metaquestions: The Space of Thought in Philosophy and Beyond.

Bruce Janz

This project entails further refining and developing the technological apparatus necessary for the creation of broad quality digital film media from a mobile source taking into cognizance the specific advantages that such a breakthrough would have for millions of previously disadvantaged South African citizens whose access to the mainframe of the digital grid is extremely limited.

The profound challenge of ensuring the long-term well-being and perhaps even the survival of human society within societal and bio-geo-physical planetary boundaries hinges critically on transforming collective behaviors and embedding and maintaining the changes in cultures of sustainability.

Ilan Chabay

The project will involve the final editing and fine-tuning of the main body of the book Nelson Mandela – Tolerance and Leadership.

The global prevalence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) is increasing, with sub-Saharan Africa having the highest projected increase.

Tommy Olsson

What makes us human? We have long known that humanitys uniqueness–language and our openended creativity–arose from our ancestors in Southern Africa, a generative promiscuity pervading all we do, from combinatorial tool making to combinatorial language; and from there to music and mathematics.

Robert Berwick

Since the publication of his landmark book, African Philosophy: Myth and Reality(1976), Paulin Jidenu Hountondji (1942-2024) has become one of the most important names in modern African philosophy.

Sanya Osha

This book project follows the symbiotic atmospheric pathways that connect plant and human breath to develop forms of cultural theorizing accountable to an increasingly climate-deranged world.

Helene Strauss

A study of how Malthus relates to understanding, and resolving, the food-land-population predicaments of sub-Saharan Africa.

Race Changes is a book about people whose seemingly permanent racial or ethnic identities in fact change over the course of their lifetimes.

Paul Spickard

Against the background of memory activism and decolonial movements in Southern Africa, much discussed since the South African #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015, this project traces the complex transfigurations of anti-colonial struggle memory, culture, and citizenship in postcolonial Namibia from the late 1990s through to the early 2020s.

Heike Becker

As the global population is projected to rise from 8.

Hilde Bras

This project seeks to overcome the (economistic, functionalist) limitations of received understandings of crisis, by drawing on the thought of Karl Polanyi, especially his 1944 work, The Great Transformation.