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2025
“Many Voices One Song.” Health-promoting Schools: Evidence, Strategies, Challenges and Prospects
Globally, a moral imperative exists to ensure that all children are provided with the resources and environment necessary to enable them to reach their individual potential, and the call for investment to improve the health of children is almost universal.
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.
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.
Approaching Human-Environment System (HES) based transdisciplinary processes: The case of Global Transdisciplinary Processes for Sustainable Phosphorus Management
Humankind is facing a new age, i.
Assessing current use and future potential of legumes and symbiotic nitrogen fixation in Africa
The Agricultural Green Revolution of the 20th century, which resulted from plant breeding and increased fertilizer use, led to food sufficiency and security in many parts of the world.
Beyond Extraversion: Ways towards Intellectual Self-reliance
Most publications by philosophers, scientists and other scholars from Africa and the Third World have so far been intended for an external audience and particularly a Western audience.
Cooking increases the energy value of meat
Processing food extensively by thermal and nonthermal techniques is a unique and universal human practice.
Developing a Model for Electronic Dictionaries
The advent of the electronic area has opened new ways to conceptualise and to organise knowledge.
Ecoinformatics
The discipline of Bioinformatics has emerged in the field of molecular and cell biology to deal with the huge amounts of information generated first by genomic and more recently by transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic studies.
Faith and Fabric (The status of ‘secular modernity’ in an African context)
In 2005/2006 the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin hosted an inter-disciplinary research project on secular modernity in which world-renowned Fellows like Hans Joas (German sociologist at the Freiburh Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS), professor of the University of Chicago), who led the project, Charles Taylor (Canadian philosopher) and Jose Casanova (sociologist of religion from New York), amongst others, studied the nature of secularisation and the presence and role or religion in different so-called modern societies.
Genres of Critique
This project seeks to open and explore a liminal space for critique between aesthetics and politics.
Global Media Ethics: Fundamental Values Amid Plurality
The growth of global news media presents a fundamental challenge to the theory and practice of media ethics.
Good Governance and Poverty Relief
The project explores the hypothesis that the eradication of inequalities (especially the alleviation of poverty) in developing regions and especially in Africa is directly dependent on the practice of good governance – not only by governments, but also in the corporate and NGO sectors of society.
Health care interactions in multicultural societies
Communication has been identified as the single biggest barrier to health care and the provision of culturally and linguistically appropriate services is a top priority, particularly in light of the illness burden imposed by diseases such as HIV/AIDS.
HIV Strain Dynamics
A growing concern in HIV research is the emergence of drug resistant strains of the virus.
Human skin pigmentation: Further studies of its evolution, biological consequences, and social meaning
Recent research on the topic explored the effects of skin pigmentation on human health and social well-being, and upcoming projects will focus on these aims.
Informational Development and Human Development: South Africa in a Global Perspective
In a current comparative research project the interaction between informational development and human development has been examined in various contexts, including Finland, Silicon Valley, Chile and Taiwan.
Institutional Ecology, Sustainable Use and Community Based Natural Resource Management
Ecosystem services and wild resources are worth more than global GDP.
Institutional Innovations and Investments: Creating an Enabling Environment for Emerging Agro-Enterprises in Africa
Agro-enterprises make important contributions to employment and income generation in developing countries, occupying a strategic position in manufacturing that comprise an essential supply-source of food and fiber production and represent an important demand-driver for agricultural products.
Inter-contextual hermeneutics: interpreting the bible in its social-historical and contemporary contexts
The contemporary western academic modes of reading the bible which focus on the history of the text or the text itself, and serve western interests and goals are inadequate for addressing questions and issues from African contexts.
Interpreting the life of Chief Albert Luthuli
This is a study of the legacies and meanings of Chief Luthuli’s life in history and today.
Islands of Work at the Rough Edge of the World; and: Archiving Culture and Nature: Harlan I. Smith’s Ethnographic Record of the Pacific Slope
Two book-length studies will be completed.
J.M. Coetzee: A Critical Biography
The Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee is currently South Africa’s most resourceful and influential writer.
Lawmaking for Global Crisis Situations
More likely than not, the world will be facing a series of serious crises, connected to climate change, environmental disasters, natural catastrophes, shortage of all kinds of raw materials and sources of mineral energy, as well as new financial crises.
Linear vs. Polarizing Trends in World Social Processes
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.
Literacy Practices of Multilingual Students
Traditionally, teachers of reading and writing have assumed texts as monolingual and monomodal.
Mobile filmmaking
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.
Moments of awakening: Apartheid and the making of a psychologist
Moments of Awakening, is the last project that will bring to completion the trilogy of life writing projects initiated in 2005.
Population, Land, Food: Malthus and Africa
A study of how Malthus relates to understanding, and resolving, the food-land-population predicaments of sub-Saharan Africa.
Private lands conservation in law and culture
Many ecological conservation goals require the use of legal means to channel land development and otherwise curtail unsound uses of privately owned lands.
Regime shifts in social-ecological systems: impacts on ecosystem services and implications for poverty alleviation
Regime shifts refer to large, persistent changes in the structure and function of complex systems such as intertwined social-ecological systems (SES).
Rethinking Capitalist Crisis: A Neo-Polanyian Perspective
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.
The Global Crisis and the Future of Democracy
The project is concerned with the sustainability of democracy around the globe in the wake of the 2008-2009 financial and economic crisis.
The HIV-Exposed but Uninfected (HEU) Infant: How Can the Excess Morbidity and Mortality be Explained?
This project has expanded beyond the initial STIAS realm and is the outgrowth of an initiative developed between STIAS and the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS), associated with the University of British Columbia.
The Karretjie People of the Karoo
This play centres on the harsh and challenging world of the itinerant group of sheep shearers in the Karoo who have now virtually disappeared.
The Pitfalls of Reductionism in Vaccine Research
Reductionism has been the predominant research strategy of molecular and structural biology in the 20th century.
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 of Judicial Review in South Africa
South Africa’s turn to liberal constitutionalism has attracted wide interest from comparative politics scholars.
The Quality of Young Democracies
After the initial euphoria surrounding democratic transitions since the 1990’s, what is the present state and future prospects of these young democracies?
The role of inhibitory and disinhibitory processes in the brain in the formation of esthetic judgement
Scholars in the humanities continue to resist the possible applications of the cognitive neurosciences to the understanding of cultural phenomena.
The Role of Knowledge Experts
The advent of the knowledge society has placed the spotlight on the role of experts as gatekeepers and as brokers of knowledge.
Tightening the Consistency of Quantum Bayesianism
Quantum Bayesianism is an effort to interpret all the probabilities arising in quantum theory (our most accurate physical theory to date, the one ultimately responsible for almost all of modern technology) in terms of the Bayesian conception of probability – that probabilities quantify subjective degrees of belief, rather than objective features of nature.
Towards a New Humanism
Why do we simply fail to establish a more human society in South Africa?
Urban Music and Identities
Cape Town has a rich and most diverse musical heritage, shaped by all kinds of cosmopolitan influences.
What is a Rational Response to Catastrophic Risk?
When it comes to low probability-high impact (even catastrophic) risk, the judgment of ordinary people, it seems, is not to be trusted.
Xenophobia, Migrancy and Multiculturalism
Different causes and expressions of xenophobia are analysed by comparing three countries: South Africa, Germany and Canada.
You, me and I
Identity is a term much used yet hard to define.