We use cookies to enhance your browsing experience, serve personalized ads or content, and analyze our traffic. By clicking "Accept All", you consent to our use of cookies. Read more in our Privacy Policy.
2024
A critical assessment of the quality of Community Schemes Ombud Service (CSOS) adjudications (judgments) in sectional title schemes and recommendations as to how the quality of the adjudications can be improved
On 17 October the South African government introduced a Community Schemes Ombud Service for the swift and inexpensive resolution of disputes in community schemes of which sectional title schemes are the most important.
A new evolutionary perspective on the nature of the individual
The evolution of individuality was first systematically addressed in a very influential book by Leo Buss in 1987.
A New Path to Welfare: Rights and Constitutionalism in the Global South
The rise of neoliberalism caused a ‘lost decade’ of development in large parts of the global South.
Against Isolation: Transnationalism and Literary Dialogue in Dutch-Afrikaans Formations
Critics on both sides of the so-called ‘Afrikaans question’ tend to characterise the language as a hyper-local, and hence insulated, socio-cultural phenomenon.
Black Freedom from Selma to Soweto: Gender, Consciousness, and Power
Two distinct, mutually influential, and globally inspirational black freedom struggles in the last half of the twentieth century – against segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa – are largely understood through charismatic leadership.
Bringing Physics and Chemistry to Life: from random walks to robust organization
Hans V. Westerhoff will put together the theoretical foundations of today’s biology in a comprehensive new theory, by researching and establishing connections between the various theoretical approaches in use.
Can South Africa use Land-based Financing for Biodiversity Conservation?
Globally there are calls for incentives for biodiversity conservation, including the mobilization of financial resources to implement biodiversity targets effectively.
Christianity and Social Thought in Contemporary African Literature
Against the background of ongoing debates about decolonisation and religion in Africa, this project examines the representation of, and engagement with Christianity in contemporary African literature.
Combining Supercomputer Simulations and MeerKAT Observations to Understand Galaxies Across Cosmic Time
For millennia humans have gazed into the sky and wondered where it all came from.
Contemporary urbanism on three continents - a study of the city regions of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Gauteng (South Africa), São Paulo (Brasil) and Paris (France)
In ‘urban studies’, a varied area of research that crosses over many disciplines, two contemporary areas of focus that attract much attention are ‘southern urbanism’; and comparison of cities.
Controlling stem cell fates to advance skin regeneration
Skin stem cells give birth to daughter cells that eventually become specialized cells to form our protective, watertight skin and to produce hair.
Democratized Precision Diagnostics
Modern medicine aims to improve our current abilities to diagnose and treat human diseases via a more personal health assessment.
Developing molecular tools to study genetics codes using single-cell genomics
The ability to characterize cell types and their genetic programs across tissues, have profoundly accelerated through the development of single-cell sequencing methods.
Echoes: A Collection of Historical Short Stories (working title)
This project looks back at history via the short story genre.
Extending the concept of local adaptation
Most species occur in subdivided (fragmented) populations.
From Africans to Blacks: The Making of a Racial Identity in Contemporary France
The purpose of this project is to analyze the construction of black identity in 21st - century France.
Genocide and Hope: Studies in the Architecture of Oppression and the Redemptive Possibilities of Nonviolence
I have conceptualized a work encompassing four distinct yet related books, each around 150 pages long, tentatively entitled the Genocide and Hope Quartet, and comprised of the following parts: Dandi; Auschwitz; Hiroshima; and Robben Island.
God’s Creolization. A Regionally Sensitive Reconceptualization of the Religious History of Israel and Judah in the Iron Age
In this project, for the first time, the history of early Israelite Religion is based on the results of historical research on the emergence and development of the two states Judah and Israel.
Implant Associated Infections
The aim research project is to find new ways to prevent and treat implant associated infections.
Israel’s Forgotten Invasion: An International History of the 1982 Lebanon War
Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon was a formative moment in Middle Eastern and international history, reshaping Israeli and Lebanese politics, society, and culture; the fate of Palestinian self-determination; diaspora Jewish attachments to Zionism; and Western policy across the Arab world.
Leila Aboulela: Writing Women, Writing Islam
This is a book-length biography of Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela (b.
Life cycle sustainability assessment of (de)centralized power grids
Many parts of Africa are today not connected to an electricity grid.
Losing the Lustre: The End of Gold in South Africa
Gold dominated South Africa for a century.
Modelling and simulation of actuators based on bio-inspired self-sustained electronic oscillators
Bioinspiration is the use of physical and technological principles to design devices working almost as biological entities (from the animal and vegetal species).
Neuron diversity and vulnerability in neurodegenerative disease
Neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, are devastating disorders affecting millions worldwide.
Open Data in the Age of Generative AI
In recent decades nations around the world have begun to open up significant amounts of the non-personal data they generate, gather and hold.
Reasoning in Physics: The Bayesian Approach
This project addresses the question of what constitutes good scientific reasoning.
Reframing the Right to Education in International Law (and Deconstructing “Cultural Rights” More Broadly)
Changed circumstances since the adoption of the primary international human rights treaties, a multitude of scattered education rights norms, and distinct new challenges require a reframing of the right to education in international law.
Representing Abortion as an Ordinary Experience to Achieve Reproductive Justice
The way we talk about abortion needs to change.
Seaports and Development: Nigeria and Angola since the 1980s
Can seaports function as growth poles outside the Traditional Maritime Nations?
Space and temporality in family language policy: Multilingualism, linguistic repertoires and lived experiences
With increased transnational migration in recent years, children growing up with more than one language has become more and more common as people cross borders, integrate into new cultural-linguistic landscapes, form intermarriages and partnerships, and create multilingual families.
Species delimitation from genetic data – a quantitative assessment of a spatiotemporal approach
Despite its fundamental status in biology, the species category definition remains controversial and quantitative methods to test species status are in their infancy.
Storying the blue Anthropocene from the oceanic South: oscillating and turbulent perspectives on the planetary crisis
This project seeks new critical and creative perspectives on the planetary crisis in forms of storytelling from the global South and the southern hemisphere that address the oceanic and hydrological effects of the Anthropocene.
Taking Evolutionary Biology Beyond the Gene
Evolution depends on the copying of genetic information (DNA) with the incorporation of changes (mutations) that are inherited by subsequent generations.
The “social work” of work: Gendered dependencies of rural livelihoods in southern Africa
While policy-makers and international development practitioners in southern Africa put a great weight on supporting job creation given several decades of jobless growth in the region, there is less attention on how women and men are both differentially situated in labour relations and how they differentially make claims on resources that come from work activities through, for example, idioms of kinship, family, patronage, or friendship.
The coloniality and necropolitics of nuclear sacrifice zones: The case of South Africa’s nuclear waste disposal site, Vaalputs
A key feature of the Anthropocene is the production of nuclear waste.
The interface between South African publishing, authors, the academy, and anglophone publishing elsewhere in Africa: a personal retrospective
Surprisingly little is known about how the South African publishing industry has operated over the past 35 politically tumultuous years.
The Martyr: A Graphic Comic Novel that explores the link between economic inequality, marginalization and violent extremism and radicalization in East Africa
The Martyr traces the story of Omar, a young Kenyan man and a talented sculptor who joins the Al-Shabaab after being innocently arrested in a police swoop and locked up for two years.
Wetting phenomena in nature and in artefact
Wetting phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and in our manufactured technological environment.
2023
Assembling the Postcolony: Cultural Cold War and Filipino Area Studies
How did a film, a workshop, an anthology, and a department promote decolonization and steal its potential at the same time?
Contemporary urbanism on three continents - a study of the city regions of Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Gauteng (South Africa), São Paulo (Brasil) and Paris (France)
Bioarchaeology is the study of human remains found in archaeological contexts, also taking these contexts into account to help understand humans on the landscape.
Diophantine Equations and Linear Recurrences
Diophantine equations appear when one searches for solutions of algebraic equations in two or more variables which are easy to represent as numbers like integers, or fractions.
Global Right, Global White: South Africa in the Political Imaginary of the Radical Right
This project focuses on the unique position of South Africa and the Afrikaner minority within the narratives and imaginaries of contemporary transnational radical right-wing movements.
Modelling Memory: From Statistical Mechanics to Behavioural Economics and Beyond
Memory plays an important role in many real-life situations; in particular, it is obvious that remembering past experiences affects future choices.
The Clocks of Life
Phileas Fogg, the main character in Jules Verne’s acclaimed novel Around the World in Eighty Days, could not have suffered from jet-lag during his trip, despite crossing multiple time zones.
The Idea of Humanity and the Challenge of Cultural Diversity
Who and what we are as humans have always been controversial questions.
The role of children’s early development in lifelong health and human capital
The importance of early childhood development (ECD) for both individual and societal economic and humanitarian growth is increasingly appreciated and efforts by governments and multilateral agencies to improve human development are taking shape, including in low- and middle-income countries.
Trauma, vulnerability and mental health problems in South Africa and Sweden
Globally, mental illness is more responsible for extreme distress than poverty or unemployment, and, to compound the problem, mental illness interacts with poverty and unemployment in socially and economically impactful ways that create reinforcing cycles.