2026

A Continent Under House Arrest? Migration, Security, and Contested Sovereignties in the Sahara

Since the 2000s, the surveillance and coercion of individuals living in or travelling through the Sahara have been encouraged and implemented by international, European and African actors, often in blatant violation of international law.

Activist Language Scholarship: A Framework for Integrity

Our project joins sociolinguistics, philosophy of science, and research ethics in an extensive and close collaboration to explore the conditions of integrity in politically engaged scholarship.

African population exposure to extreme weather events under solar radiation modification (SRM) geoengineering

Climate change is causing extreme weather events, including droughts, floods, heat waves, and heat stress, which are threatening sectors such as food security, access to drinking water, and public health.

American DNA: Bioethics and the Excavation of Difference from the Human Genome

The resurgence of race in genomic research has renewed longstanding debates about the biological basis of human difference, raising urgent ethical questions about how science reanimates and recodes the meaning of race.

Assessing the impacts of climate change on ecosystem services in African montane ecosystems

The 2030 agenda for sustainable development by the United Nations emphasizes the need to protect the planet from degradation…… (UN, 2015).

Breaking the ice: how integrating cryogenic Electron Microscopy can overcome historical scientific isolation and enable local pharmaceutical and vaccine Development in South Africa.

With the award of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry to three pioneers in cryogenic electron microscopy, the world was awakened to the cutting-edge technology of 'cryo-EM'.

Children’s Mental Health and Human Rights Amidst Conflict: How Agency and Activism Shape Psychological Resilience and Survival Skills

This project explores how children living in conflict zones respond to violence, displacement, and systemic injustice—not only as victims, but as active agents of survival and resistance.

Chronocide: Temporal Dimensions of Russian Foreign Policy Discourse

The project aims at deconstructing the temporal dimensions of the Russian foreign policy discourse.

Classification conundrums: Classifying, re-classifying and de-classifying conflicts involving alliances, coalitions, umbrella groups and proxy’s

The proposed monograph aims explore the following constructs, ‘alliances’, ‘coalitions’, ‘umbrella groups’ and ‘proxy’s’ in the context of the law of conflict classification.

Contracts in South African Family Law

South African law increasingly relies on contracts to resolve disputes between family members and to address new practices like surrogacy and open adoptions within the family environment.

Cost of Testimony: Mediating and Marketing the Suffering of Distant Others

My project explores the aesthetics, ethics and politics of literary witnessing in five auto/biographical texts from the S-21 detention centre in Cambodia in relation to the politics of representation and the mediation of victims’ voices in witness literature from the cultural margins.

Critical Raw Materials and Technological Transitons: tethinking natural resource-led development models

Critical raw materials (CRMs) are increasingly vital to contemporary economies and societies.

Degrees of becoming: Young women’s use of higher education as a symbolic resource in the making of selfhood

Transitions to adulthood are life-making projects—efforts to construct meaning and possibility even amid uncertainty.

Discipline of the Screen: Cinema and public order in South Africa

This project departs from the emergence of cinema in early 20th century South Africa, and its role in constituting a new public sphere around this form of leisure.

Establishing Criteria and Organizing guidelines for Advancing Standards in Biochar production and consumption using Renewable and Innovative Clean Alternatives

Biomass is the primary energy source for cooking and heating in many developing countries, including Ghana, where nearly 70% of the population rely on fuelwood, charcoal, animal droppings, and agricultural waste.

Ethnic Dilemma: The Politics of Inequality and Governance in Kenya

This project explores how ethnicity shapes governance and inequality in Kenya.

Euthanasia and Physician assisted suicide (PAS) from a regulatory perspective

This research proposal focuses on the regulation of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS), adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines legal—i.e., constitutional and criminal—analysis with empirical insights from the field of public governance and regulatory governance.

Generative AI to Strengthen Global Health Security

Infectious disease threats to individual and public health are numerous, varied and frequently unexpected.

Geophysical Fingerprinting of African Archaeological Sites: Developing a Multi-Method Framework for Characterizing Historical Clay and Mud Structures

This project aims to develop a comprehensive framework for characterizing traditional clay and mud-based structures in African archaeological contexts.

Global fertility industry and the Future of Humanity

With the expansion of reproductive technologies, the making of a baby has become an enterprise with a market for any, and all, related services.

How the ocean ventilates heat and carbon

A primary challenge to 21st century global climate predictability is understanding the ocean’s role as a heat and carbon sink or source to the atmosphere.

Human models to understand and treat autoimmune disorders

We will use different approaches to clarify what initiates an autoimmune disease and to devise better treatment.

Immunogenicity of multi-epitope transmission-blocking vaccine candidates based on Aedes mosquito saliva proteins

From January 2022 to August 2024, a total of 45,652 cases and 1492 deaths were reported in 12 African countries.

Inorganic nitrate, a dietary approach for prevention of cardiovascular disease

We study the chemical biology, physiology, and therapeutic effects of nitric oxide (NO) and related reactive nitrogen oxides.

Insights from the biology of the Cape honey bee: understanding nuances of social relations in social insects

The unfolding appreciation of the effects of the parthenogenetic production of female eggs from laying workers of Cape honey bee workers on social relationships in colonies has proved to be a rich source of ideas regarding the interplay between individual fitness and colony fitness.

Integration of structure/function predictions into the CERI emerging threat genomic surveillance pipeline

The Centre for Epidemiology Research and Innovation collects high-precision and timely data on emerging health threats by carrying out a world-class genomic surveillance effort.

Knowledge, Power, and Policy: Constructing a Political Economy of Innovation and Research in Post-Apartheid South Africa

South Africa has long been a leader in scientific research and innovation on the African continent.

Landscaping the Cape: “improvement”, the politics of visibility & the heritage e/affects of socio-ecological commoning, 1872 – 1948

This project builds on scholarship about landscape and memory in Cape Town by looking at how “nature” historically structured the material making of the cityscape, and the racially-heterogenous socio-natural commons that emerged in the city during the 20th century.

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.

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.

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.

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 onomastic (re)presentation of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in Zimbabwean political discourse (1980-2025)

The Zimbabwean political landscape has been toxic and polarised since the formative years of African nationalist movements in the early 1950s.

The Power of Movement: Saharan perspectives on politics

Northwest Africa has recently been the site of a large variety of political movements.

This House Is Not for Sale

Current research explores land, home, and community in South Africa through a sociological lens.

Trauma Theory and Childhoods in African Fiction

This monograph project intervenes in the timely debate around the ‘decolonisation’ of trauma theory by providing a revised understanding of the theory’s Euro-American foundations primarily dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis and northern scholarship on the issue of difference.

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.

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

“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.

“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 Forest of Memories: Trauma and the Biafran Identity in Post-colonial Nigeria

The Nigeria-Biafra War of 1967-1970 occasioned the Igbo pogrom and the lingering memory of starvation as a weapon of war.

A new evolutionary perspective on the nature of the individual

A book entitled Evolutionary Perspectives on Pregnancy(with Columbia University Press) will be completed and published.

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 Season of Prosperity (working title)

This novel will blend a sequence of narratives, set at various turning points in the history of the British Virgin Islands from 1807 To present day, concerned with the themes of body and work, individual and collective identity, and the intersections of trauma and Virgin Islander identity.

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.

All too real: race thinking and thinking about race in post-1994 South Africa

The project is to work towards completion of a book under the working title of ‘All too real: race thinking and thinking about race in South Africa’.

An Evolutionary Cybernetic Theory of Semiosis

In recent years, particularly in the emerging field of biosemiotics, it has been proposed that semiotics - the study of signification processes - could bring a paradigmatic shift in our scientific conception of life, and consequently in scientific biology in general and beyond.

Application of wastewater-based epidemiology to determine human exposure to pesticides within selected counties in western Kenya

The use of wastewater epidemiology approach has been on the rise recently due to its cost effectiveness and ability to identify emerging chemicals such as pesticides from wastewater.

Archives of the Ethical: Market Exchange, Ethical Relations, and Sensory Politics in the Urban South

Archives of the Ethical: Market Exchange, Ethical Relations, and Sensory Politics in the Urban South brings together in comparative perspective, historically situated ethnographic insights of urban market practices in Cape Town, Accra, and Mumbai.

Are Trout South African? Or: A Postcolonial Fish

There has been substantial attention paid in literary and postcolonial studies to issues of environment and ecology, and especially the environmental transformations which colonial and imperial histories have wrought upon the (post)colony.

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.

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.

Assessment of the current cold chain potential of the Ugandan food system

The annual increase in the global population worldwide puts pressure on the food systems to avail enough food for all global citizens.

Assistance to Visual Impairing People using Deep Learning and Type-2 Fuzzy Logic

Blind or visually impaired people (BVIP) are increasingly encountering difficulties in their daily lives.

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.

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.

Biological Laws: Analogies and Allometries

The question of whether there are laws in ecology is important.

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.

Counter-securitization: Discourses of Resistance and Decoloniality from Africa

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.

Ctrl Z: Undoing Narratives

The proposed project seeks to explore how retraction and recantation take shape in experimental writing of the 20th and 21st Century.

Dealing with the Past (Historical memory)

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

Decay Widths of Baryon Resonance

A meson fluctuation about a two-flavored chiral soliton model is studied.

Decolonisation and affective worlds: On the worldmaking potential of shame and rage in the South African “post”-apartheid present

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.

Developing a hypothesis on the “domestication syndrome” of animals

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

Developing a Model for Electronic Dictionaries

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

Dogon Muslims, “Pagan” Saints, and Other Seeming Oxymorons in West Africa

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

Double Vision

This project will be a work of creative non-fiction, exploring issues of identity, boundaries, and vision that have been of concern for many years to a scholar who has been both literary critic and biographer.

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.

Ecological and non-ecological speciation mechanisms

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.

Ecological elimination as a major evolutionary force

Populations fluctuate but seem generally stable in the long run.

Emerging Legal Geographies of Cultural Rights

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

Environmental degradation, economic development, and gender: A comparative analysis

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.

Enzyme Responsive Bioinks for Breast Cancer Tumor Modelling

Breast cancer is the most prevalent cancer among women worldwide.

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.

Food security in sub-Saharan Africa from the production, human and environmental safety standpoints

Africa, once considered the breadbasket of the world, is now highly dependent on food imports.

Freedom Between Order and Chaos: Towards an Indian Theory of Freedom

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

From first-generation students to the second: An inter-generational study of post-apartheid South African higher education

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.

Gandhi’s Printing Press: Global Trajectories of Print Culture in the Indian Ocean

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

Gender in Turbulent Times: Sexual Violence, Bare Life and Necropolitics

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

Generation of a Chronic Myeloid Leukemia single-cell genomic atlas

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

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.

Global Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services – Challenges and Opportunities

This project has the aim to complete and finalize a large global initiative in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Convention of Biological Diversity (SCBD).

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.

Gunning for Democracy: The Military and Power Transfers in Malawi and Zambia

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

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.

Historical Feeling: Exploring the Decolonisation of History Education

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

History wars and Indigenous Rights

Indigenous rights claims remain a central, unresolved human rights issue in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa and the United States.

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.

Identification of novel biomarkers for gynecological cancer – when is screening becoming a reality?

Over 1.3 million women are each year diagnosed with one of three major gynecologic cancers, ovarian cancer, endometrial cancer or cervical cancer.

Identity and Belonging: Teenage Parenthood in Kampala’s Informal Settlements

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

Igniting conversations that nurture equitable collaboration and cocreation

It will be my task to engage in conversations that build and offer opportunities for cocreation in research and higher education.

Imitators and Innovators: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851-1921

Although African economic history is enjoying a renaissance, the branch of the subject represented by business remains relatively neglected.

Impact of climate change and land use on the conservation of Pterocarpus species in Burkina Faso (West Africa)

Plant biodiversity is essential to the survival of the human being and the whole biosphere.

Inclusive multimodal (re)design for higher education pedagogies in South Africa and Sweden

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

Inflammation in cardiovascular disease: Regional differences between Sub-saharan Africa and Nothern Europe

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

Information and Codes in Biochemistry

Biochemists traditionally accept the view that life is an extremely complex form of chemistry (the Chemical paradigm), a view which implies that genetic information and the genetic code are but metaphorical concepts because they cannot be described by physical quantities.

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.

J.M. Coetzee, Connection, Cognition: Perspectives from the South

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

J.M. Coetzee: A Critical Biography

The Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee is currently South Africa’s most resourceful and influential writer.

Jan Bouws and the Instituut vir Volksmusiek (1960-1972) at Stellenbosch University

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

Jurisprudence of the SA constitutional court – a comparative study

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.

Land tenure in secondary cities: discourses, practices, and social representations

Building on empirical findings of former projects (spread over the years, from 2014 to 2023), the research project aims at conceiving land tenure otherwise, deviating from standard approaches by putting the articulation of interests and claims first; tracing how actors relate to each other and how they try to make their own claims heard and recognized by others.

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.

Life: autonomy in evolution

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.

Lift Stories: The intimate publics of elevators in 20th century Johannesburg

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

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.

Macrophages in Human Tissues-Phenotypic Diversity in Health and Disease

Macrophages represent a heterogeneous family of white blood cells which are widely distributed throughout the body.

Merging the layers of life

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

Metapopulation modelling of disease spread in the context of war and other natural disasters

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

Metaquestions: The Space of Thought in Philosophy and Beyond

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

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.

Mobile telephony and acute injury care

In the context of a collaboration between Stellenbosch University (SUN) and Karolinska Institutet (KI) the project aims to facilitate the diagnosis and care of burns patients in resource poor areas, building on modern information communication technologies like camera phones.

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.

Money from nothing: popular economies and indebtedness in South Africa

This project explores the over-indebtedness of South African consumers, set against the longer history of exploitation of South African black people by the forces of capitalism, and interrogates how these currently manifest themselves in an allegedly ‘neoliberal’ social order.

Narratives and knowledges for emergent cultures of sustainability: shaping credibility, legitimacy, and implementation of shared decisions

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.

Nelson Mandela – About Tolerance and Leadership (a biography)

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

Omics Approach for Personalized Prevention of Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus for African and European Populations (OPTIMA)

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

Out of Africa: Human Generative Creativity and the Origins of Language

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.

Paulin Hountondji: The Last of the Titans

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.

Phytospheric Justice

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.

Piety versus Orthodoxy

This project explores the relationship between two very different types of theology that have characterized theological thinking in the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa during the past 150 years: mystical theology reflecting on the assumptions underlying the personal piety of believers and confessionalism aimed at defending orthodox doctrine.

Playing at/against power: Histories of Trauma and Abuse in South African Music-Pedagogical Spaces

The proposed project builds on some of my earlier work on music and violence, and is born of the politico-ethical imperative to break the silence surrounding structural violence and abuse in institutionalised spaces devoted to music pedagogy: the lecture room, the teaching studio, the community project.

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.

Potential severity of antimicrobial resistance in context of COVID-19 pandemic and phage-assisted bio-control: one health approach in Benin and Pakistan

Several studies reported that bacterial co-infections have been considered an important contributor to morbidity and mortality of COVID-19.

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.

Psychology, neoliberalism and changing subjectivities in Southern and Eastern Africa

Recent scholarship on the ‘postcolonial subject’ in Africa and beyond posits a link between neoliberalism and the evolution of new subjectivities.

Quantum and collective phenomena induced by PT-symmetry in opto-electromechanical array

Parity-time (PT) symmetry has attracted a lot of attention in many fields of physics in recent years.

Race Changes: Shifting Identities in World History

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

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).

Remembering anti-colonial struggles: The politics of memory, culture and national identity in postcolonial Namibia

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.

Reparations for Victims of Apartheid

In spite of the increasing recognition in international law of the need for reparations for victims of serious human rights violations, the overwhelming majority of victims of Apartheid has not been compensated by the South African government and has not had access to legal avenues for the payment of such reparations.

Restructuring settlements towards a healed future: The case of the Adam Tas Corridor initiative in Stellenbosch

Cities and larger towns are increasingly home to the majority of people, globally and in South Africa.

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.

Signs on stage: Translating theatre into a sign language

Sign languages, the visual-gestural languages of Deaf communities, lack a written form.

Social and Economic Justice

The South African Constitution contains extensive social and economic rights.

Socioecononomic health inequalities: measurement, explanation and policy evaluation

The main purpose of this project is to identify and quantify the major causal mechanisms that drive the changes in socioeconomic health inequalities in Sweden.

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.

South African Literature: Global Challenges, New Humanities

This project positions South African Literature within the emergence of the New Humanities (Medical, Environmental, Digital), and orients both toward Medical, Scientific and Social Sciences’ emphases on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Speaking Through Houses: Property and Personhood in Zimbabwe’s Urban Margins

In contexts of displacement and marginality, people’s aspirations and active material and political struggles for secure housing – alongside their multi-layered efforts at home-making – might be construed as acts of either insurgent optimism or necessary anticipatory investment.

String Theory and Quantum Gravity – New Developments and Links to Low-energy Physics

The project explored the relationship between classical gravity and quantum field theories, as well as possible applications of the mathematical structures of string theory to low energy systems such as Quantum Hall Fluids.

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.

Technological knowledge: A new structure

The purpose of this project is to help energize the innovation chain — the sequence of events that leads from scientific discovery, to technological progress and on to practical application.

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 African Union’s emerging policy on unconstitutional changes of government

This research project is on unconstitutional changes of government (UCG).

The Agrarian Question in the 21st Century

Since the start of my career the focus of my scholarly research has been what has been defined as the agrarian question.

The Boxing Economy of the Eastern Cape

What is the link between the national formal economy on the one hand, and on the other, local community based economic and leisure cultures, which may have been largely self-sustaining but interminably precarious?

The Days Lived in Yellow

How do we come to know what we think we know?

The evolution and philosophy of endogenous death

The fate of every organism is death—or so it seems.

The Future of Human Mobility and Migration

The future of human society – and indeed, the very meaning of what it is to be human – is inextricably related to mobility.

The Future of Population in LMICs

The world reached 8 billion people in November 2022.

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 New Internationalist - The Life and Times of Radhabinod Pal

Judge Radhabinod Pal is a forgotten man in international law.

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 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 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.

The State versus Neville Alexander and ten others: The causes and consequences of a political trial

This book project concerns the 1963-64 trial of Neville Alexander and ten other members of the National Liberation Front (NLF).

The syntax of Xhosa nominals

Generative linguistic theory holds that language is shaped by principles hardwired in the human brain.

The Truth About Crime

Many African postcolonies are haunted by the spectre of: the waning efficacy of law enforcement, the ambiguity of authority, and the apparent abandonment of subjects by the state.

The work of culture in an age of informational capital

The major project is to outline and pursue further research on the forthcoming book, titled ‘Intellectual Property and its Publics: The Work of Culture in an Era of Informational Capital’ which explores new pressures and tendencies to treat culture as a resource and the growing propensity to claim rights on cultural grounds under neoliberal capitalism.

Theory from the South

‘The Global South’ is rarely seen as a source of explanation for world historical events.

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?

Towards re-conceptualization of socio-cultural climate change maladaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa

Reconceptualization of socio-cultural climate change maladaptation in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) demands a nuanced understanding of regions diverse social, cultural and environmental contexts.

Towards understanding the dilemma of Food Security in the rural areas of South Africa

Although South Africa is food secure on a country level, large numbers of households within the country remain food insecure.

Understanding Alzheimer’s Disease: Basic mechanisms and clinical developments

The abnormal processing of amyloid precursor protein (APP), aggregation of Aβ, Tau hyper phosphorylation and propagation of these abnormally folded proteins have been collectively recognized as hallmarks of the initial, biochemical phase of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) [De Strooper 2016].

Understanding Emergence

Emergent behaviour seems to be characteristic of the `complex systems that currently feature in Mathematics, Computer Science, the Physical Sciences and Philosophy.

Upcycling of textile waste

The textile and clothing sector generates a large amount of waste that are either incinerated or disposed in landfills.

Urban Music and Identities

Cape Town has a rich and most diverse musical heritage, shaped by all kinds of cosmopolitan influences.

Uses of Literature

The value of literature is minimised in the functioning of society.

Water, drought and song in the Kingdom of eSwatini

This project aims to explore ideas surrounding water within the musical world of eSwatini.

Wetland gentrification in African cities: Implications for urban governance, planning, and theory

While studies in the global North have focused on ‘green gentrification’ driven by park developments and eco-friendly initiatives, a different phenomenon is unfolding in rapidly urbanizing African cities.

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.

When solar current is cheap, plentiful and lasts all night through…what then of coming energy systems in Africa?

Organic photovoltaic systems now give more than 10% conversion efficiency from sunlight.

Wine, Temperance and South African Connectivity c.1900 to the Present

Although wine is often conceived of within bounded national histories, it is a commodity that is best understood within a global framework – especially since the transformations necessitated by the spread of phylloxera in the later nineteenth century.

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.

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.

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.

Crossing Boundaries in South Africa’s Divided Cities: how conviviality, creativity and co-operation helped undermine apartheid

Within global urban historiography there has been no detailed exploration of the nature and consequences of mingling across ethnic, racial or national boundaries in cities strongly socially and spatially divided along such as Belfast, Beirut, Jerusalem or Johannesburg.

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.

Germline specification and its role in epigenetic inheritance of diseases

The germline functions to perpetuate life and relay genetic and epigenetic information across generations.

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.

Inhospitable Places: Feminist Thinking on Whiteness, Men, and Various Kinds of Women in South African contexts

Inhospitable Places is a feminist project that works with thinking about race, gender and class in contemporary South African contexts.

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.

Legal Prostitution: A Crime Against Humanity?

Despite extensive social science research documenting the coercion and damage attendant and endemic to the sex industry and decades of legal debate on approaches to this problem, no effective legal challenges have resulted.

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.

Local adaptation of parasite off-host stages

Human-caused changes are affecting the environment in ways that challenge many organisms, including parasites.

Migration: An economist’s historical perspective

This project provides a historical perspective on migration, demonstrating that it is the defining feature of our species, without which homo sapiens would not have thrived and populated our planet.

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.

New approaches to anti-obesity therapeutics – Part 2

Obesity is a medical condition defined as the excessive accumulation of fat that presents a risk to human health.

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.

Restitution of Gains from Profit-making Wrongs

The law of unjustified enrichment is about achieving corrective justice, and the aim of my project is about developing a more perfect way of attaining this goal by investigating the phenomenon of enrichment flowing from the invasion of another’s rights.

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.

Sustainability, international trade and digitalisation: Core elements of sustainable soil management governance in the Global South

Based on the results of a previously terminated project Mapping out options for a model legislation on sustainable soil management in Africa, a model legislation for sustainable soil management is currently under development, for adoption by the Pan-African Parliament (PAP) and subsequent transmission as a proposal to all national parliaments of the African Union.

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 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.

Urbanist at Large: Iterating an Urban Sensibility

The STIAS Fellowship will be used to define a new field of research for the next four years.

Wetting phenomena in nature and in artefact

Wetting phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and in our manufactured technological environment.

Where Does The Air Go?: Making a Women's Opera

My project involves writing a song cycle to form the basis of an opera, Where Does The Air Go?

2023

#JustAndEquitableNow: Reimagining Arts and Humanities in Our Universities

The #JustAndEquitableNow team reflects on what it means to make, teach, and research the arts when communities are protesting against longstanding injustices and demanding better futures.

Aesthetics of Trauma: Transgenerational Memory and the Poetics of Repair

Interest in the study of the traumatic repercussions of violent histories on descendants of victims and survivors has proliferated in the sub-field of memory and trauma studies, with earlier research in the field focusing mainly on descendants of Holocaust survivors.

Alkebulan: The Return of the Leopard

Alkebulan: The Return of the Leopard is set in the formative phases of the African Federation made up of the continent and its diasporas – Caribbean Africa, European Africa, N.

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?

Assistance to Visual Impairing People using Deep Learning and Type-2 Fuzzy Logic

Blind or visually impaired people (BVIP) are increasingly encountering difficulties in their daily lives.

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.

Criminal Desire: Race, Gender, and Illicit Interracial Sex in Apartheid South Africa

This project examines the production, enforcement, and impact of the Immorality (Amendment) Act (1950) during apartheid.

Defining Humanity through Water and Sanitation

My project focuses on water and sanitation through the technologies that provide them, as a highly specific material index for abstract sensibilities about what constitutes a proper and dignified human life.

Developing a cross-species nomenclature for the neural cells of the gastrointestinal tract

Gastrointestinal (GI) dysfunction has considerable impact on life-quality worldwide.

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.

Dynamic organic nanooptics

The beautiful colors of stained glass arise thanks to metal nanoparticles embedded in the glass.

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.

Index of (B)reachings (2000)

An artist is trained to be visually aware.

Legal Infrastructure and the Living Law of Livelihood

An almost maniacal commitment to cost, comfort and convenience has eaten into the infrastructure of collective institutional life.

Leveraging Polymer Nanotechnology in Agronomy

To secure access to food for the growing world population, significant increases in agricultural productivity are needed.

Limbo: A Novel

My aim is to work on a draft of a novel I’ve been writing for several years.

Modelling how Diversity Sustains Societies’ Resilience (MODUS): How does incorporating biodiversity change solutions of optimum resource-use problems?

Throughout environmental history, humanity has prospered from the natural resources provided by the biodiversity in their environments.

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.

Nature is beautiful

Evolutionary ecology theory applies principles of biological evolution to explain variation in how living creatures appear and behave.

PAGASA

Prompted by Roland Barthes’ The Preparation of a Novel, this presentation outlines how in the course of pursuing the creative life as a poet, a translator, an independent filmmaker and as a small press publisher from one of the regions of the Philippines, I now cast myself to another kind of vita nova, by wanting-to-write this tetralogy, which I have happily conceived during my STIAS residency.

Palestine Time: Temporality, Cinema, Liberation

Zionism does not only colonize space; it also colonizes time.

Pinpointing the association of obesity with the risk of cancer and mortality

The connection of obesity with major chronic diseases and causes of death is well-known, but knowledge is scarce for rarer diseases, and for other obesity-related markers than a single measure of body mass index (BMI, kg/m2).

Process Biology

Since around 500BCE, when Heraclitus declared that everything changes while Parmenides maintained that everything stays the same, the dichotomy of process and substance has been at the heart of Western philosophy.

Psychology Otherwise: A Decolonial Africa(n)-centered Approach

From #RhodesMustFall to #BlackLivesMatter, an important component of anti-racist protest movements has been concerns about epistemic injustice.

Queer Transitions: Biographical Space and Black Visuality in the Remains of Apartheid

A quarter century into democratic South Africa, it is a truism that Apartheid’s forms remain present in various ways.

Recognition and Identity: Ethical and Theological Explorations

This project engages with the notion of recognition as a crucial moral, political, and theological category.

Reducing fibrotic scar tissue to treat spinal cord injury

Spinal cord injury unproportionable occurs in young adults with devastating consequences for their physical, mental, social and professional life.

Settling Nature Managing and Imagining Nature Reserves and National Parks in Palestine/Israel

Settling Nature documents the widespread ecological warfare practiced by the state of Israel.

The Amateur

Is a humanist intellectual with a popular audience more likely to be a credentialed expert or an autodidact?

The Anthropocene, the Climate Emergency and International Relations: Brazil and South Africa in a Changing World Order

The main objective of this project is the finalization of a monograph analysing the linkages between the anthropocene, climate change and International Relations.

The Art and Visuality of Contact between Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe, c. 1450-1550

Increasingly, from the later part of the fifteenth century, European traders and travellers had seen people and places in sub-Saharan Africa.

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 Geopolitics of Language and Literature Migration

The Anglophone diaspora arose during the period we identify as the Anthropocene.

The Idea of Humanity and the Challenge of Cultural Diversity

Who and what we are as humans have always been controversial questions.

The lifeworld-phenomenology of rehabilitation: developing a practice based theory of life-changes and learning

Worldwide, at least 2.2 billion people live with visual impairment and there is a huge need for these cases to be addressed or prevented.

The logic of decoloniality

Whilst most decolonial scholars have made important contributions on the nature of coloniality as an intellectual problem and the need to decolonise, the practical deployment of decolonial programme is yet to commence.

The rare earth metals, from intriguing materials to political hot potatoes

This project will be a comprehensive review of the rare earth elements (REE) .

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.

Transdisciplinary thinking through food in South Africa

The communicative, semiotic, creative and relational meanings surrounding food expand understandings of power dynamics, identity-constitution and discursive perceptions of being human.

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.

Vertical Indian Ocean: A Cultural History of the Southern Submarine

The Indian Ocean has been called the ocean of the South, as well as the ocean of the future.

West African Migrants in Urban Spaces: Dakar, Tangier, and Barcelona

This project analyzes the presence and impacts of West African migrants in urban spaces in North Africa and Southern Europe: how the sociopolitical contexts they enter shape their lives and livelihoods and, in turn, how they challenge and alter those contexts, raising questions about rights, membership, and lived diversity.

Work at Sea: Port dynamics, migrant workers, and industrial fishing fleets in African waters

Industrial fishing is a dangerous, difficult job: workers endure long working hours, cramped living conditions, inadequate provision of food and water, and low wages.

2022

Academic Freedom and the Decolonization of Knowledge: Conflicts and Dilemmas in Higher Education

Decolonization may be taken as a phase in the history of colonized people that is represented by a movement towards a critique of colonial effects during both colonialism and postcolonialism.

Adaptive Peace: Insights from Complexity for Strengthening the Resilience and Sustainability of Social-Ecological Systems

Complexity theory offers new ways of understanding how social-ecological systems function under pressure, for example how climate change related stressors may exacerbate competition over scarce resources or limit livelihood options.

Alternative targets for Antibiotics, fighting infection with higher specificity

Antibiotic resistant is a global problem that will only increase over time and is further highly relevant for the tuberculosis patients of South Africa.

Aquatic ecosystem protection; the application and effectiveness of metal bioavailability-based approaches

Metal bioavailability-based approaches are used to predict the bioavailability of metals in surface waters and toxicity to aquatic organisms.

Beasts of the Southern World: multi-species history and the Anthropocene

Charles Darwin jotted in his notebook in 1838, He who understands the baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.

Capricious Connections: the politics of knowledge infrastructure in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean Islands

This project enables the completion of ongoing research that explores knowledge systems in the South Atlantic and Indian Ocean islands.

Certain uncertainties: Identity politics, power and categorisation in postcolonial Kenya

Before the 2017 election, Kenya’s President declared the minority ethnic Makonde community recognised as ‘the 43rd tribe of Kenya’.

Chinese investments in Africa: Exploring the developmental potential

The global economic architecture has in recent decades undergone a significant level of reconfiguration in terms of trade and investments as a result of the emergence of China as a direct competitor to highly industrialised countries of the North.

Citizenship on Catfish Row: Race and Nation in American Popular Culture

Citizenship on Catfish Row focuses on three seminal works in the history of American culture: the first great film, D.

Computational modelling of tubular fibrous scaffold Structures for cardiovascular graft applications: parametric modelling, and Finite Element Analysis

The design of tubular structures with desirable internal and external topology represents a challenge for tissue engineering of cardiovascular grafts.

Consistent Quantification as a Unifying Principle in Physics and the Sciences

Science relies on numeric quantification, which can be traced back to Euclid, Galileo, and Newton.

Conspecifics matter – An integrated approach to reveal the basis and the significance of social interactions

Social interactions are central to most organisms and the social environment experienced by an individual influences its behaviour and ultimately its (evolutionary) fitness.

Deadly Illusions: The Ukraine War and Russian Historical Imagination

Some commentators have aptly called Russia’s Ukraine war a war of obsession.

Decoding the Ancient Sacred Landscapes of the Arid Southern Levant (Southern Jordan/Israel): The Desert Cults Mapping Project

The proposed project investigates the sacred landscapes of the southern arid margins of the Levant (now southern Jordan/Israel), as observed by the spatial distribution and the material culture of the cultic and funerary sites of the mostly semi-pastoral peoples that lived in the area from the Neolithic to the Early Islamic period (ca.

Developing a complexity science capable of solving practical, important, and urgent problems

The process of transforming agriculture in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is, especially for policymakers and decisionmakers, highly complex.

Development from below? Islands of effectiveness or Enclaves in South Africa today.

What influence does living or working in a given area, an area delimited –even if informally - from its surroundings, have on those inside and those outside this distinct area?

Developmental origins of racial and gender bias in very young children and how it unfolds

This project addresses how, and how early, racial and gender biases emerge in young children and how they are shaped by the linguistic and social communities (families, schools, neighborhoods) in which children are raised.

Digital State Capitalism: African Smart Cities and a Game-Theoretic Perspective on Global Data Governance in Flux

The increasing digitalisation of international trade deepens globalisation, and data flows play a key role in this transformation.

Finding Homer

FINDING HOMER is a contemporary music-theater work.

Fintech for SME financing in Africa

SME financing has often been described as the missing middle piece of finance as SMEs are less likely to obtain financing than larger corporates or even micro borrowers.

Global trout: investigating environmental change through more-than human world systems

This project investigates how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to new modes of conservation and environmental management that are responsive to the complex histories and politics of species introductions.

Global Value Chain Law: A Socio-Legal Approach to the Constitution of Connectivity, Contracts and Corporations

Ongoing tensions concerning cross-border supplies of medical equipment and vaccines and accusations of vaccine nationalism illustrates the pivotal importance of global value chains (GVCs).

Land Reform and Rural Production in South Africa

The Presidential Advisory Panel on Land Reform and Agriculture (2019) argued that ‘land reform must be oriented around growing the agricultural sector to foster economic development, and not purely be an endeavour to transfer land’.

Licence to Talk

Licence to Talk is an attempt to describe the ‘actually-existing’ South African public sphere in all its messy complexity.

Making Mouse Models That Better Reflect Human Metabolic and Neurological Diseases

In addition to their well known functions in the controlling infections, immune cells and inflammatory reactions play crucial roles in metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases, such as obesity and Alzheimer’s disease.

Methodological Work Towards a Contemporary African Ephemeral Literature Archive

The published novel is on the decline across the African continent.

Oman: a genetic melting pot – Historical background relating to inherited blood disorders in Oman

The Sultanate of Oman is in a unique geographical location, at the Southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula.

Optical imaging using digital holography with phase apertures

Understanding the world around us begins with observation, and imaging is one of the main observation tools.

Paths from Personalist Rule: Understanding Institutional Transformation in Contemporary Africa

This project analyzes the fates of rulers and regimes which came to power in Africa in the 1980s-90s.

Power, Patronage and the Informal Sector: co-optation and coercion in state-society relations in Zimbabwe and Zambia

This project will use a multi-site comparative design to explore how ruling parties in Zambia (and Zimbabwe) extend their reach through dispensing ‘public’ goods such as market and bus stalls as well as housing developments to rule by co-optation rather than coercion in increasingly adverse political or economic climates.

Prospects for Regional Integration in Africa – A Comparative Perspective

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) is the current initiative to form the world’s largest free-trade zone in terms of number of countries.

Psychosocial evaluation of patients with beta thalassemia major in Oman

Homozygous Beta thalassaemia is a lifelong condition requiring regular blood transfusions from infancy.

Relational Egalitarianism and the Equality Jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of South Africa

Equality is both a foundational value of the Constitution of South Africa and a protected right.

Religion and Dialogue in Modern Societies: Possibilities, Challenges, and Limitations of Interreligious Dialogue, with a Focus on Dialogue in Theology and Education

The growing religious pluralisation of modern societies has placed the question of religions and dialogue at the centre of public and academic attention.

Reversible Technologies

Despite tremendous economic growth rates, especially in rural areas of South Africa and in its neighbouring countries, there is still a subsistence economy predominant.

Social Regionalism in the Idea of Transnational Labour Law

We have entered a moment of profound challenge for open societies.

Sounding Black Worlds

My project investigates black archives of Atlantic worlds as praxis and method, with a particular focus on sonic aspects.

South African – Swedish effort on pre-hospital diagnostics of stroke and traumatic injuries

The purpose of the present project is the implementation of cost efficient, easy to use, diagnostic tools for stroke and trauma in the sub-Saharan Africa, where there are very limited resources in terms of medical personnel, hospitals and diagnostic devices.

Speaking Animals in African Literature

This project deals with the representation of the narrating animal in present-day African texts written in English, French and Portuguese.

The “Big Hole”, Kimberley South Africa, 1870-1920

The chance find of a diamond on a small hillock in South Africa one hundred and fifty years ago initiated an industrial mining revolution, the effects of which continue to reverberate far into the future.

The City of Hope and the Garden of Life. A Protestant Ethics of Sustainability

The objective of this project is the finalization of a volume on Protestant ethics of sustainability which draws on more than 15 years of inter- and transdisciplinary research into the field.

The future of biological and cultural diversity: The implications of Anthropocene effects

Building on previous research on accelerated change and globalisation and on similarities between biological and cultural processes, this research project studies the ways in which global modernity reduces ecological diversity and cultural variation, and explores which measures are taken to counter this tendency, which takes away options for the future.

The Historical Origins and Development of Universities in South Africa

The intention of the research project and book on the history of universities is to consider and trace how important contemporary issues were understood and addressed historicallyin general, and at specific universities in South Africa.

The politics of blood and the memory of the martyrs: an inquiry into the political legacy of Bantu Stephen Biko

In September 1977, Bantu Stephen Biko was murdered by the South African security police.

The road between and The call

Mkhululi Mabija and Paul Castles as a librettist-compose team working on two companion pieces of alternative music theatre.

The WetNet: Pathogen Mobility and Fluid Bonding in Twentieth Century Biomedicine

My research, based in close discourse analysis of primary and secondary medical and legal literatures, offers a history of the hepatitis B virus and vaccine development in the period from 1940 to 1988.

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.

Toward a cognitive science of smell: Reconsidering "higher" cognition from the perspective of a "lower" sense

Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary research paradigm that emerged after WWII and that studies the mind at psychological, computational and neurobiological levels of analysis.

Towards designing less-toxic antibiotics

Mitochondria are essential organelles found in every human cell, required to convert food into usable energy.

Trespassing as a way of being: ancestral heritage in South Africa

My study of prehistoric art in the Northern Cape, South Africa probes the quest for an authentic past in relation to the region’s complex, layered history, from ancient traces to contemporary concerns.

Was the Cape a biotic reservoir in the repopulation of Africa after the KT extinction event 66 MY ago?

The extinction of dinosaurs after a 10 km wide meteor struck Earth in today’s Caribbean, 66 million years ago, marked the division between the Cretaceous and Cenozoic (popularly known as the Age of Mammals).

Why Do Authoritarian Regimes in Africa Adopt Women’s Rights Reforms?

The recent authoritarian turn globally raises questions about what happens to women’s rights in such contexts.

2021

A History of South African Literature - Afrikaans Literature since 1930

The third volume concluding my comprehensive, novel history of South-African/Afrikaans literature explores the period from the 1930s onwards.

Adopting Electronic Nose for Detection of False Codling Moth on Pepper Exports in Uganda

The false codling moth (FCM) is a key quarantine pest in Africa.

African Cinemas: Spaces, Technologies, Audiences and Genres

This research project presents an ethnography and political economy of different spaces – cinemas, film festivals, websites, and other public spaces – where African films are screened, as well as an analysis of contemporary African films and of the genres and trends they represent.

Analyzing Natural Disaster Management Policy in SSA

Although an African Union Comprehensive Strategy Guide for Disaster Risk Reduction (AUDRR) exists, escalating natural disasters continue to aggravate livelihood insecurity across the continent, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

Animist Humanism: Decolonizing Philosophy of Religion In And Through African Cosmo-Sense

Increasingly, philosophy of religion is charged with failing to admit its Eurocentric character.

Capital Movement Through Trade Misinvoicing in Africa: A disaggregate approach

It is now recognized that poverty reduction efforts in Africa are undermined by capital flight.

Constitutional Identity and Constitutionalism in Africa

The main purpose of this project is to interrogate whether the challenges faced by the new generation of African constitutions to enhance the prospects for constitutionalism was due, inter alia, to their lack of alignment with the African social context in terms of reflecting an African constitutional identity.

Constitutionalism and the internet in Africa: Progress, challenges and prospects

There is no doubt that significant inroads are made in of information technology in Africa.

Defining Humanity through Water and Sanitation

My project focuses on water and sanitation through the technologies that provide them, as a highly specific material index for abstract sensibilities about what constitutes a proper and dignified human life.

Desire, Agency, and Gender in Ancient Near Eastern Love Poetry

The Song of Songs, a collection of ancient erotic poetry known to the modern reader as a part of the Jewish and Christian Bible, belongs to the ancient Near Eastern tradition of love poetry together with the poems written in Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian.

Documentary, Desire, Description: South Africa’s ‘Second World War’ and the mediation/materialisation of ‘witness’

This project centres on South Africa’s first illustrated magazine Libertas (1940 -1946) a vehicle of anti-Fascist advocacy and propaganda for pro-Allied engagement in WW2.

Epistemic Virtues of African Proverbs: Implications for Decolonizing Knowledge in Africa

This project examines Akan and Yoruba epistemic virtue proverbs and theorises how they can be harnessed to transform knowledge and achieve epistemic decolonisation in Africa.

Establishing Optimal Approaches for the Fabrication of Artificial Tongues for Smart Detection and Removal of Toxic Metals in Water

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.

Fight against antimicrobial resistance in poultry farms in Benin by bacteriophages: a study based on the One Health approach

In Benin, the preliminary studies showed that the leafy vegetables produced in southern Benin were contaminated with C.

Gandhi’s Satyagraha: Exploring Non-Violent Alternatives for Effective Political Resistance and Transformation

Challenges confronting our contemporary world like terrorism, populism, and religious pluralism recommend revisiting Gandhi’s concept of satyagraha.

Genealogies of music accompanied narratives in South Africa: Choral tradition, music theatre and opera

The multivalent opportunities provided by the post-apartheid policy-led transforming cultural scene saw an intensification of cultural activities mushrooming throughout the country.

Government agricultural finance interventions as instruments for social protection: a comparative review of developing economies

Strategies promoting social protection for agricultural growth have been remarkably successful in some countries (mainly Asian countries) but not in others (mainly African countries).

Health-economic modelling of strategies to manage gynaecologic cancer in developed countries and low resource settings

Cervical cancer is globally the third most common cancer in women, and in South Africa it is more common than breast cancer.

Is it well with my soul? Effects of contemporary African religious practices on well-being

Promotion of well-being and healthy lives is the third goal of the United Nations Organization Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) (United Nations Organization, 2015) and as such well-being has become a major concern among national leaders and policymakers.

Metaphors of identity, recognition and connection in the 20th century - cell biology and literature

Every knowledge-based discipline proceeds trough history by coining new terms.

Mitigating antimicrobial resistance: Implications for ecological and public health

Antimicrobial resistance is a global problem which affects both developing and developed nations.

Orthogonal polynomials and data sciences

Orthogonal polynomials appear in many areas of applied mathematics and in particular in numerical analysis.

Pacing within sonic spaces: a psychology of music and work

Throughout history, the power of music to enhance productivity at work has been exploited.

Patent Offices – The Problem of Profits: What striving for PTO profits can do to a patent system

This project aims to address the economic mechanisms governing or heavily influencing all significant patent offices (PTOs) worldwide.

Queues of Limitless Hope: The Novel and Social Crisis in the African Republic of Letters

Queues of Limitless Hope asks: what happens to the novel form under the conditions of protracted socio-political crisis?

Representing Discontent: South Africa in words and on screen

This project focuses on the affective shaping of identity in South African texts of the 21st century.

Review on the use of BTK inhibitors

The beauty of BTK inhibitors is that they impair tumor development by blocking normal, unmutated BTK, causing many lymphoid tumors to be sensitive, as we have reviewed.

Sleeping beauties: Dormant innovations in nature and culture

Innovations in biological evolution and in human culture – from science to the arts – arise by processes with multiple parallels.

Study of multiple scales epidemiological models using Tikhonov-Vasilieva and geometric singular perturbation theory

The presented project aims at a systematic study of multiple scale models in epidemiology.

The construction of the Shona subject as historical, contemporary, personal and social in Zimbabwe: the impact of the social fabric in the construction of the individual

The trilogy is a young adult dystopian speculative fiction designed to sensitize African and global adults, to the need to engage politically and personally in order to take their destiny into their own hands.

The Dialectics of Emancipation and Africa: political theory and political practice

Beginning from the understanding that it is imperative today to develop new concepts for the thinking of an emancipatory politics on the African continent (Fanon), this book develops and expands into new empirical domains the arguments first enunciated in my treatise on political theory Thinking Freedom in Africa: toward a theory of emancipatory politics which was awarded the Frantz Fanon Prize in 2017.

The Evolutionary Commons

Humanity is facing an existential crisis from global climate change.

The First Generation of Independent African Leaders and the Making of the African Nation-State

This research project examines the first generation of independent African leaders and how they went about constructing new African nation-states: forging a sense of nationhood out of disparate African ethnic groups brought together within artificial colonial boundaries through colonial rule; imagining the new nation through culture, religion, and the arts; choosing or defining a development model in a world divided into opposing camps of East and West by the Cold War; and the excitement of new sub-disciplines like development economics and its promise to transform former tropical colonies.

The Legacies of the International Criminal Court Intervention in Kenya

The International Criminal Court (ICC) intervened in Kenya after the disputed 2007/8 election that led to displacement of more than 650,000 people and death of 1133 lives according to the post-election violence commission report (GOK 2008).

The manipulability theories of causality in the space of the multiple mental representations of time flow: how stable is causal relationship?

Human mind continuously produces explanations because an explained world is perceived as more understandable, more secure, open for forecasting and for planning of successful actions.

Towards epistemic justice: Language, identity, and relations of knowing in postcolonial schools

This project is concerned with the role of language in epistemic justice, defined as an ethical project of reversing epistemic exclusions, mitigating epistemic harm, and seeking parity of epistemic authority for historically marginalized speakers and knowers.

Uneven Extinction: anxieties over life and death in times of crisis conservation

The current ‘sixth extinction’ event represents a major crisis for conservation as well as for global society more generally.

Viniculture in Ethiopia

The most important wine country in Africa is South Africa where grapes and wine were introduced by the white settlers in the 17th century.

Women in Law: Perspectives Across Africa

The corpus of scholarship from the Global North signal an increasing global feminization of the legal profession.

2020

Beyond the Secular: Jacques Derrida and the Theological-Political Complex

Combining insights from political theology, postcolonial and critical race theories, this project interrogates the contemporary relation between religion and politics through an exploration of Jacques Derrida’s political thought.

Black Archives and Intellectual Histories

Black Archives and Intellectual Histories brings together a range of scholars from South Africa, the continent at large and the black diaspora whose work has transformed our thinking about black intellectual histories and archives.

Citizenship, International Justice, and the View from the South

The project is based primarily on a book manuscript under contract with Routledge Press: Citizenship in a Globalized World.

Consumerism and its dissidents: a social history of white South Africa, c 1950s -1970s

In general South African historiography has been marked by constant emphasis on apartheid, black resistance and formal Afrikaner politics has.

Continued work on the evolution of skin colour

While at STIAS, I plan to complete a long-standing data analysis of large bodies of archaeological, paleontological, and climatological data in order to gain a comprehensive understanding of the evolution of skin colour in Homo sapiens for a joint project with Nina Jablonski.

Deciphering the biological consequences of geometrical isomerization of natural compounds.

Plants produce myriad of compounds with various biological properties.

Directorial Authority and the Formation of the Modern Executive. The Governance of the African Chartered Companies

This is a proposal that seeks to advance a new interpretation of the history of the formation of ideas and institutions of the Executive branch of government.

Embodied Human Freedom

This research is a part of a larger project: a book on a philosophical account of human freedom, drawing strongly on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.

Federalism in Africa in Comparative Perspective

Federalism is arguably one of the less explored subjects in African political studies.

Fundamentals of laser powder bed fusion of metals

Additive manufacturing (AM) of metals (3d printed metals) is set to disrupt manufacturing industries through its many advantages including complexity and innovation in design, short lead times, minimal waste and distributed manufacturing potential.

Gender, Luxury, Waste: New Intersections in Southern Consumption Theory

This project will bring together original, recently completed empirical work examining cultural and media dimensions of three key facets of contemporary consumer culture in the global south, with a view to generating new theory relevant to consumption in the global south.

Gender, Sufi Ethics and Social justice in Islam

This project is based on completing a book manuscript focussed on Gender, Sufi Ethics and Social justice in Islam, which is under contract to Oneworld Academic Publications for their series Islam in the 21stCentury.

Global Humanities

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

Hair: The Natural and Unnatural History of a Human Obsession

Hair is one of the most distinctive features of the human species and of individual people.

ICT-Based Platforms as a Driver of the Transformation of Africa's Smallholder Agriculture

For a number of years we have been observing the rapid growth and proliferation of ICT­-based platforms for small farmers all over Africa.

Is Somaliland a Country? The Status of Institutional Objects in the Social Sciences

Somaliland is a democratically governed, autonomous region that defends its borders and issues currency in its own name.

Local media: Western media in a context of orality in Africa

This book project in four parts intends to study how people, coming from a centuries-old orality, act in a context of copyright introduced by colonial and postcolonial authority.

Local soil knowledge: a tool for sustainable agricultural systems in Madagascar

Local soil knowledge is an important source of information when designing sustainable agricultural strategies.

Making Sense of Postgraduate Education in Context

Discourses related to globalisation privilege the role of knowledge workers in economic development.

Mobility solutions as a South African urban integrator: the Adam Tas Corridor test-bed case

Development planning for the Adam Tas Corridor in Stellenbosch has been undertaken by a multidisciplinary group, including local and provincial planning authorities, urban developers, transport specialists and various Stellenbosch based interested and affected parties, including STIAS, Stellenbosch University and a number of Stellenbosch based businesses.

Occupational Health and Well-being in the Performing Arts in South Africa: The formation of an interdisciplinary Performing Arts Health network led by the universities of Stellenbosch and Pretoria

This project aims to consolidate and develop a national Performing Arts Health network led by Stellenbosch University and the University of Pretoria for interdisciplinary scholarly activity in the field of performing arts health in South Africa.

Open air discourse: romances of resistance in the Somali women’s struggle for independence

Mingling together historical record, myth and fiction, my aim is to write a play taking place in Mogadishu during the struggle for independence from Italy soon after the Second World War.

Scientific persona and internalization of research – the role of the Rockefeller Foundation in creating scientific and scholarly identities and promoting academic careers in early twentieth century Sweden

American philanthropy, notably the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), played an important role in the internalization of research in Europe after the First World War.

Single polarized-photon emitters based on III-nitride pyramidal quantum dots for quantum cryptography

The modern society is reliant on digital communication, at present experiencing an immense expansion, but the communication should also be secure.

Small Ocean History

The Small Ocean Project explores how a historical focus on the intimate and ‘everyday’ lives of mobile subjects, within their simultaneously cosmopolitan and parochial worlds and intimate networks for transnational capital accumulation, can help us understand south-south globalization and its effects on Islam, capitalism and international regimes, around the turn of the 20th century.

Splitting Dynamics and Quantum Hydrodynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates

Since the realisation of the first Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) a couple of decades ago, there have been intense works on the quantum gas field, aiming mostly at unravelling the quantum properties of matter at large scale and to experimentally mimic the behaviour of physical systems that cannot be directly explored.

Stellenbosch innovation district

The clustering of economic activity has brought economic benefits in the past - London for finance, Hollywood for film, San Francisco for tech.

Text, Human Rights and pandemics: Being human in times of contagion

Partly prompted by and responding to the effects of Covid-19, our project takes a long-shot view of text, contagion, and ideas of the rights-bearing human over time.

The ambiguity of English as an academic lingua franca: Perspectives from South Africa

Grounded in linguistic anthropology, the primary objective of this project is to provide a nuanced ethnographic account of how the sociocultural ambiguity of English as an academic lingua franca is one of its most defining features in the South Africa education system.

The Disorder Project

The Disorder is a body of work developed under the rubric of an ongoing project namely, To Be King.

The Impact of Social Media on Science Communication

Social media are now a major part of our daily life.

The impact of technological change on developing countries

The accelerating capability of computing power and development of artificial intelligence poses new questions regarding the future of work.

The Morality of Martiality: Beyond Good and Evil in Liberation Struggles

This is an interdisciplinary research project on the morality of martiality.

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

The African Union in January 2016 adopted a treaty – the Protocol to the African Charter on the Rights of Older Persons – dealing with the rights of older persons in Africa.

The story of Jabu Vilakazi – the Robin Hood of Soweto

The tension between personal experience, memory and historical fact is dynamic.

The theoretical alignment of Bayesian statistics and cumulative prospect theory

The focus of this research is combining Bayesian statistics, in particular Bayesian data analysis, with utility theory.

The UN and its Discontents

The project aims to explore little-studied dynamics among and behaviour of UN member states and staff members that constrain the organization, and render it resistant to meaningful reform and vulnerable to achieving sub-optimal results, against two possible overall hypotheses:Hypothesis 1: The UN’s underperformance is rooted in structural tensions: a) between sovereignty-based principles and between expectations that the Secretary-General needs a degree of policy autonomy; b) between a UN that relies on member states for funding and backing and a UN that is tasked to uphold set of universal human rights norms; and c) tensions over the nature of UN legitimacy.

Unsettled Futures: Precarity and the Project of Post-Apartheid in the Countryside

This research focuses on South Africa’s democratic period and in particular on the state ambition- which I call the post-apartheid project— to provide a better life for all its citizens.

Urban Connections in African Popular Imaginaries

The study of popular culture in Africa illustrates that ordinary African residents in urban settings use their local specificities to create popular forms of African cultural production that respond in innovative ways to global cultural imports.

Using a projectivized approach towards advanced studies in mental health research and developing graduateness among mental health students

Postgraduate students could benefit from joining a projectivized research project, as this could be helpful to focus research objectives early in their career.

White Women Engaging Black Lives Matter: Problematizing Solidarity in a Time of Identity Politics

The brutal police killing of George Floyd in America on 25 May 2020 has led to global mass protest action through the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement against police brutality and other institutionalized forms of violence against Black people.

Working title: “A dictionary and reference grammar for ǀXam – a lost Khoisan language of the !Ui sub-family, formerly spoken by Sān communities in the early Cape and the interior of South Africa.”

This account of the |Xam language—from the !Ui branch of the TUU family—is envisaged as a contribution that will help to restore part of South Africa’sintangible cultural heritage.

Working title:Elusive Spring

An award-winning journalist working for a British-owned newspaper, investigates a series of killings that appear to be politically-related; the more he does so, the more he and his associates are threatened, and he has to negotiate numerous attempts to undermine his credibility with the planting of fake news, large sums of money being transferred into his account, and the odd honey trap.

Writing on Water: experiments with historical forms through Daniel Morolong and Joseph Denfield's photographs of the East London coast

The project aims to unpack the multiple ways that photographs depicting the sea can be utilised for formal experimentation and disruption in history writing.

Xnau-Xnau⁀GE@MP

The core of our investigation will be generative, site-based investigation into our music improvisation, both as practice and as reflexive engagement.

Yes, The World

My fourth novel will look at the lives of internally displaced people in India in what I hope is a formally original way – by marrying the extreme and self-conscious artifice of the pastoral mode to the density and ‘life-like’-ness of the realist novel.

2019

'How Disposed Of': Liberated Africans and the Waiting Space of Freedom 1807-1930

This project is the fruition of twenty-seven years of research on the significance of the Liberated Africans, those rescued from the holds of slave ships and dhows in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the Mediterranean and in the Caribbean between 1808 and 1888, with an aftermath that continued into the 1930s.

“Renascent Africa: Cultural Nationalism, Decolonisation, the Nationalist Movement, and Trans-Continental collaborations: The example of Nigeria and South Africa.”

The idea of a renaissance suggests new consciousness, new attitudes, and values that undergird a new era of human development.

A History of the Nighttime in South Africa

This project is a book-length study of the history of the nighttime in South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A Place to Call Home: A comparative study of the urban housing boom in Luanda and Nairobi

Despite their very different political and economic contexts, both Luanda and Nairobi have experienced housing booms and urban property bubbles over the last fifteen years.

Adam Tas Corridor - unlocking the regeneration and transformation of Stellenbosch

This project applies the principles of massive small urban system change to the Adam Tas Corridor, an area in the city of Stellenbosch that comprises 400 ha along two intersecting transport routes.

African Composition Techniques

My project is to write a Composition Treatise which draws largely on my six-volume set of nearly 100 piano pieces, Afrikosmos.

African International Courts

In the course of the last decades, several international courts have been established, either within the African Union [AU], or within the Regional Economic Communities [RECs], and even within some smaller sub- regional organizations.

After the Eruption: Reflections on Higher Education in South Africa

At this critical historical conjuncture in South Africa, at the very precipice of tumultuous social change, multiple forces converge onto the stage of higher education in South Africa.

An Emerging Middle Class, Changing Mortuary Practices, and a New Funeral Economy in Northern Ghana

My current research project looks at recent dramatic changes to funerals among the Dagara of northwestern Ghana.

An Ordinary of Agony. The Social and Political Production of Superfluous People

The present research proposal aims to work on an anthropology of misfortune in Cameroon by describing and analyzing critically various forms of malevolence in media narrative in Cameroon.

And Still I Rise

This project is an autobiography.

Black Swans in Public Administration: Rare Organizational Failure with Severe Consequences

The subject of the project is organizational failure in public administration with severe consequences for the physical integrity of humans.

Bodies and/as Texts: Representing queer on screen in contemporary Africa

The body is an assemblage of not only the physical and the material.

Cancer treatment by manipulation of mitochondria

Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally, and to reduce this societal and economic burden new treatment options will be needed.

Coetzee, Kentridge, and the Computer: Automation and the Arts in South Africa

This study explores the reciprocal relationship between technology, politics, and the arts.

Compensation Through Expropriation without Compensation? Land Reform and the Future of Redistributive Justice in South Africa

The decision by the South African Parliament in February 2018 to review the constitutional property clause possibly allowing for expropriation without compensation has fervently brought the land question back into public debate.

Complexity and the Shift in Modern Science

Science has shifted in the last 120 years from a grounding in the Enlightenment ideas of formalism, determinacy, rationality, and stasis; to a new grounding in organicism, indeterminacy, contingent behavior, and evolutionary openness.

Complexity beyond the real; the integration of the unknown and the unknowable into science

Complexity theory (Boulton et al, 2015) provides an important and potent challenge to the continuing dominance of worldviews informed by classical science.

Considering Zimbabwe’s 2017 Coup: Causes, Consequences, Concepts

A faction of Zimbabwe’s ruling party and many soldiers removed the country’s 93 year-old president from power over party and polity during a few weeks of November 2017.

Decolonizing Africa: A Feminist Perspective

The main aim of this project is to develop a resource that moves legal education away from the conventional teaching which focuses on the black letter of the law and perpetuates a colonial, hierarchical, and decontextualized understanding.

Digital Capitalism

This project is about digital capitalism, and more specifically, the emergence of a new gig economy associated with the rise of new platform business models such as Uber, Upwork, TaskRabbit, Helpling, and others.

Ethnobotany-based Discovery of Valuable Chemical Compounds from African Plants 1700-

Africa is known for its rich biodiversity, particularly in higher plants.

Everyday Authoritarianism: Urban Life and Politics in Luanda, Angola

This project poses the question of how authoritarian politics systems institutionalise themselves through everyday life.

Experimental Protocols for First-person Accounts

The experimental works conducted during the past 15 years by Albertazzi and others have shown that phenomenal qualities subjectively perceived are not explicable by third person accounts.

From one to many: parallels between the origins of multicellularity and social behaviour

When a unit of description makes way for a second unit that consists of many members of the first, the notion of individuality, which initially referred to the ‘one’, now refers to the ‘many’.

Global Corporations, Accountability and International Law

This research would form part of a larger project which aims to produce a new conceptual understanding of the relationship between global corporations, states, state law and international law.

Glory (working title)

A multi-generational family drama told through different periods of Zimbabwe’s history.

In Search of Utopia (working title)

We live in times of the apocalypse.

In/appropriate Personae: Contemporary Culture and the Politics of Appropriation

This project, a prospective monograph entitled In/appropriate Personae: Contemporary Cultural Production and the Politics of Appropriation, seeks to examine the growing awareness of the politics of representation and ethics of appropriation in contemporary culture, especially in relation to depictions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

Interrogating Women’s Pathways into and Engagement with Political Power in Africa: A Comparative Study of Uganda and South Africa

Over the past few decades the presence of women in government also called descriptive representation has increased significantly because of a greater acceptance of quotas or reserve seats for women.

Is the European Union a Role Model for Africa? - Lessons from 60 Years of European Integration for Africa

The project deals with the lessons of European integration for African attempts to regionally integrate further.

Law, Kinship, and the Formal Processes of Middle-Class Reproduction in Johannesburg, South Africa

This project investigates how legal and bureaucratic processes mediate inheritance in South Africa, as a window into the formal institutional dimensions of middle-class reproduction.

Luanda is not Paris: a situated epistemology of Southern Urbanism Theory

This project for a book titled In the skin of the city: Luanda, or the dialectics of spatial transformation examines the process of historic formation and transformation of Luanda, the capital city of Angola.

Making a Difference: How Anthropology Constructed South Africa’s colony, Namibia.

Colonialism was not only racist and exploitative, it was also ridiculous.

Memorializing Struggle: Dynamics of Memory, Space and Power in Post-Liberation Africa

In post-liberation societies, memorialization and commemoration can occur at a grand, national scale, often being linked to heroic freedom fighters or critical revolutionary turning points.

Migration Vulnerability and Access to Social Protection

The project concerns the availability, adequacy and access to social protection of three selected vulnerable migrant categories, i.

Militarized Global Apartheid

This book explores how new regimes of labor and mobility control are taking shape across the global north in a militarized form that mimics South Africas history of apartheid.

Mineral Wealth and Distributive Struggles on the Platinum Belt, South Africa

This project explores distributive struggles on the platinum belt in South Africa.

Mobility, Subjectivity and the Poetics of Space-making in the Western Indian Ocean Novels

Literary works by African writers of Asian descent construct the experiences of Asian communities in the western Indian Ocean (East Africa) as counter-narratives that seek to provide alternative and more nuanced accounts of Asian presence in the region.

Multi-class families, regional disparities and the emergence of middle classes in Africa

Drawing on my own fieldwork in Ghana as well as secondary sources on West Africa, but also other African countries, this project will explore two challenges in particular.

My Voice in Contemporary Art Music

I experience contemporary art music as a marriage of two musical cultures, Kiganda of the Baganda in Uganda and the western art music, which have shaped my musical performance and creativity for the last 40 years.

Neo-Abolitionism: The Case Against the Employer-Employee System

The controversial institution in the economic system throughout most of the world is not the market or private property but the employer-employee relationship.

Patriotic Thrift: Savings Campaigns and Imperial British Identity in World War II and After

During the second world war, savings campaigns mobilized the people of the British empire and commonwealth, whether men, women, or children, to make public, individual investments in the war effort.

Planetary Prejudices: Race, Migration, and Technology in the New Global Order

Taking racism as the engine of capitalism, the study of racial capitalism offers a potent framework for understanding how racism structures modern life.

Political culture in Africa and post-communist Europe: towards explaining the logic of democratic underdevelopment

The strategic aim is to prepare a book for publication that describes and explains the vicissitudes of democracy and underdevelopment in Africa and Eastern Europe by method of comparison.

Pragmatic Marker Borrowing in African Englishes: A Corpus-Based Study

There is extensive study of pragmatic marker borrowing from Asian languages by speakers of Asian Englishes, without a full exploration of pragmatic markers borrowed from African languages into African Englishes.

Prediction and reversibility of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes in black South African women

This project aim to study mechanisms underlying the very high occurrence of type 2 diabetes in black South African Women.

Producing the self through play online

The notion of playing with identity through physical appearance is particularly evident in society.

Protein deficiency, sarcopenia and cardiometabolic risk in an older urban black South African population: A cross-sectional feasibility study

South Africa (SA) is a low-middle income country (LMIC) with an ageing population and increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases (NCD).

QBism, from Pragmatism to Phenomenology

QBism (pronounced cubism) is an interpretation of quantum mechanics that takes an agents actions and personal experiences as the central concerns of the theory.

Re-Urbanism in Africa: Building Master-planned, Holistically-designed Satellite Cities

Large-scale property developers have recently embarked on a far-reaching strategy designed to reshape the existing spatial configuration of many cities in Africa.

Reading black middle-classness

For this project I am reading the burgeoning publication of essays that tackle black middle-classness and related aspects such as masculinities, femininities and race - indeed, intersections of these.

Religious Pluralism, Hybrid Identities, and the Postcolonial Religious Other

The focus of this research is religious pluralism and hybrid identities, particularly the construction of religious identities resulting from the African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Sexualities and (Dis)Abilities: (Re)Valuing Being Sexual Humans through Body Narratives

This study reads narratives that focus on the representations of (dis)abled bodies in sexually charged spaces in a bid to (re)value these bodies as they negotiate their humanity as well as their capacity to give and receive pleasure.

Short Stories of the World: Africa

This intended collection will include around 20 African short stories which will be translated into Icelandic.

South Africa and the emergence of international human rights

South Africa has played a leading role in the development of international human rights in very different and sometime diametrically opposing capacities.

Southern imaginaries, or, thinking from the South

At a time when the focus of economic development is often the so-called Global South, yet when countries of the north continue to grow in geopolitical dominance, this interdisciplinary project offers a series of cultural, historical, and literary reflections on southness.

Spotlighting social inclusion: protection of Africa’s hunter gatherers’ communal land rights in the context of sustainable development goals (SDGs) implementation

Recently, there has been a renewed interest in discussions pertaining to ‘social inclusion’, largely resulting from adoption by the United Nations, of the UN 2030 Agenda encompassing the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and a commitment by States to ‘leave no one behind’ during SDGs implantation.

The Anticipatory Perspective: What Next?

An anticipatory behavior is a behavior that ‘uses’ the future in its actual decision process.

The Negatives: A Novel

The Negatives is a conceptual novel about a photographer adrift in contemporary America who is forced to confront the ethics of her practice in a moment at which the very medium of her art has reached a state of volatility, mutability, and impermanence.

The political economy of oral health in sub-Saharan Africa – uncovering the silent oral health crisis and exposing reasons for low public health priority

The focus of the Stellenbosch Annual Seminar on Constitutionalism in Africa (SASCA) 2019 will be on constitutionalism and the economy in Africa.

The Politics of Education Reform in Middle-Income Countries

A growing scholarly consensus views high quality education as essential for sustained and equitable development.

The Role of Laws, Policies, and Constitutional Rights in Advancing Gender Equality in Africa and Globally

In every country, women earn less than men; in all but five, women are less likely to have paid employment.

The temporalities of the Informality. The case of Benin-Nigeria Cross-border Fuel Smuggling

This research intends to analyze informality as a dimension of the social contract initiated by marginalized actors in response to the crisis of welfare state in Global South.

Theological ethics in the intersection of moral psychology and sociology

There is a long-standing debate in theological ethics (as well as in moral philosophy) between, on the one hand, theories that thinks of ethics as a form of decision theory that can overcome the contingency and arbitrariness of the human body (emotions and intuitions) and the socio-historical context, and, on the other hand, understandings of ethics that sees ethics as an embodied practice embedded in traditions, narratives, social practices, institutions, and concerned with moral formation.

Towards a Politics of Singularity, or Beyond Identity Politics

Cutting across the boundaries of recent political theory, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, this project aims to show that the link between one human being and another, the social bond, consists of a traumatic encounter.

Transdemocracy

This book project is geared towards a new understanding of democracy, considering that so-called ‘democratic’ modern decisions negatively affect other peoples and thus become undemocratic.

Translation of the Amharic Novel, Tobiya (1907) into English

African-language literatures have long and deep histories in their societies but take place within fenced literary spaces and typically are unavailable to world literature audiences.

Treatment of Hepatitis C virus in Oman: a multicenter study

Unlike Hepatitis B, there is no vaccine available for protection against Hepatitis C virus (HCV).

Urban informality and middle-class aspirations in South Africa and Kenya

This project will take its point of departure in field work carried out by Bodil Folke Frederiksen and myself in two urban slum areas in South Africa and Kenya from the mid-1990s onwards.

Women’s Associations in a Pastoralist Society in Transformation: Implications for Gender-Based Livelihood Improvement Policies in Benin

How does the organization of women transform gender relations and living standards of Fulani women in pastoralist communities of northern Benin?

2018

‘Maids’ and ‘Madams’ in Caribbean and South African Women’s Texts: Approximations of Feminist Solidarity?

This project engages with the possibility for solidarity between women across differences of race, class and sexuality as it is represented in a range of artistic forms (poetry, fiction and visual images) created by women from the Anglophone Caribbean and South Africa.

“ELECTIONS, DEMOCRACY AND CONSTITUTIONALISM IN AFRICA”

The Stellenbosch Annual Seminars on Constitutionalism in Africa (SASCA) programme, African constitutionalism: comparative perspectives, falls under the STIAS project theme The future of democracy which started in September 2013.

10 year follow-up study of cardiac and liver iron using T2*MRI in a single cohort of thalassaemia major patients.

Patients with thalassemia major require regular blood transfusions from 6-12 months of age to stay alive.

A Gene Revolution for Africa? Genetically Modified Crops and the Future of African Agriculture

Africa has emerged as the ‘final frontier’ in the global debate over the potential for Genetically Modified (GM) crops to alleviate poverty and hunger for smallholder farmers.

A history of Soweto’s Morris Isaacson High School

This project involves writing a history of one of Soweto’s most historically important secondary schools, Morris Isaacson High School.

A transdisciplinary analysis of the role of social identity on performance under social stratification and stigmatisation

The emergent fields of stratification economics and identity economics offer new theoretical insights for explaining economic inequality, specifically the unique role that intersectionality (the existence of multiple social identities) might play.

Access of Individuals to the African International Justice

At the continental level, various legal instruments adopted within the framework of the African Union ((AU) guarantee a certain number of human and peoples’ rights.

Acknowledgment, Denial and Collective Memories of Mass Atrocities: Comparative Perspectives

Recent decades have witnessed systematic efforts to build institutions in response to mass atrocities, a justice cascade, and an unprecedented wave of apologies by heads of state.

APOCALYPSE 2016-2019: Decline of Jacob Zuma, Rise of South Africa?

The three years 2016 to 2019 will change South Africa more significantly than any other time since the dawn of democracy in 1994.

Archaeology of a Hungry Mind

Why and how did we (Homo sapiens) evolve into a species that is dependent on its ‘brains’ rather than its ‘brawn’ for our survival and successful spread across the globe?

Contribution of Human Enteric Adenoviruses to Acute Gastroenteritis in the Post-Rotavirus Vaccine Introduction Era in Ghanaian Children

Viruses are the most common causes of acute gastroenteritis (AGE) globally, and rotaviruses have been implicated as the leading cause of AGE in children below the age of five.

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.

Cryptography in the Quantum Age

Even though we have some basic understanding of the power of quantum computation, and its impact on cryptography and cryptanalysis, there are many open problems, some of them purely technical and some more fundamental.

DECOLONIALITY AFTER DECOLONIZATION: The question of knowledge and higher education in Southern Africa and the Global South

The Knowledge Society is a common expression nowadays in the Global North and the Global West, were knowledge means technological knowledge and training geared towards economic growth, development and modernization.

Deep learning network for South African birdsong and its wider implications on the concept of intelligence

We develop an operational convolutional neural network, that distinguishes 170 different South African birdsongs.

Democratic Governance, Corruption, and Corruption Control Mechanisms in Africa: A Comparative Study

The 1990s were the starting point in the wave of new multiparty democracies in Africa.

Dog-human correlations in post-Soviet and post-apartheid literature and film

My research project falls into the interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies and deals with the discursive formation of human-dog correlation in socio-political discourse.

Expertise and Public Participation in Government Policymaking: South Africa in Comparative Context

The fellowship at STIAS will build on my prior work on comparative administrative law dealing with public participation in policymaking.

Falsified Medicine

The project focuses on falsified medicines - a growing health problem affecting both developed and developing countries.

Fear and Forgiveness – an Eastern Cape story

The killing of Irish nun and medical doctor, Sister Aidan Quinlan, in the East London riots of 1952 at the height of the ANC Defiance Campaign, is an event that has long been difficult in the telling.

From Indian Ocean to African Indian: Through the refracted lens of Capital Art Studio, Zanzibar

What happens when an Indian Ocean past meets an African Indian present in a collection of photographs by Ranchhod and Rohit Oza, family proprietors of Capital Art Studio who together visually captured the worldly place (and centre of the dhow trade and culture) of Zanzibar from 1930 until the present day?

From Sovereignty to Property (and back): The spatial transition of colonial and developmentalist claims over land

Central to the question of land grabs around the world is a tension between the sovereignty of States - and its internal manifestation in the form of eminent domain - and the property rights of individuals and communities.

Fugitive Whispers

I am in the early stages of this project but my expectation is that it will become a novel.

Generation, Democratization and Gang Violence in the Shanties: Haiti and South Africa

In this project, I seek an opportunity at STIAS to write several chapters of a book based on a comparative account of the nexus between violence and democracy in two shantytowns in Haiti and South Africa.

Good policy; bad policy

This project proposes to examine three key policies, one in each ministry, in the form of a memoir on how decisions were taken and implemented.

Inheritance Systems and the Extended Synthesis; Picturing the Mind

I will be completing a book in the Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and Biology series, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2019; this is co-authored by Marion Lamb.

Institutional constraints on cabinet formation, coalition governance and cabinet termination

This project examines the dynamic relationships between the key actors of representative democracy in EU member states: voters, political parties, parliaments and governments.

Is It Autonomy All the Way Down? The Search for a QBist Metaphysic

The philosopher William James once wrote, Like the old woman who described the world as resting on a rock, and then explained that rock to be supported by another rock, and finally said it was ‘rocks all the way down,’ he who believes this to be a radically moral universe must hold the moral order to rest either on an absolute and ultimate should or on a series of shoulds ‘all the way down’.

Is it rape in the eyes of Uganda’s men or Community Perceptions on rape?

The project will involve analysis and interpretation of data collected in research aimed at interrogating societal definitions of rape.

It takes two: Theoretical and clinical advances in vulvodynia from an interpersonal perspective

Vulvodynia is a chronic pain condition that is characterized by recurrent vulvo-vaginal pain that does not have an identifiable cause.

Justice from above? The role of international criminal tribunals in transition countries

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) are about to close their doors and have already considerably scaled down their activities.

Land Restitution and the Moral Modernity of the New South African State

The purpose of this project is to conclude a book-in-progress, entitled Land Restitution and the Moral Modernity of the New South African State.

Legal protection of hunter-gatherer groups’ land rights in Central and Southern Africa

Africa is home to the remaining hunter-gathers, meaning traditional communities that make a living predominantly through collecting wild fruits and hunting wild animals.

Leveraging Sector Development for Urban Transformation in Africa

Africa along with Asia is the epicenter of rapid urbanization in the 21st century.

Lithium-ion batteries and the commercialization of science – a narrative

The project is to write an autobiographical narrative about the research and development of rechargeable lithium-ion batteries from a research curiosity to practical reality.

Local practices and institutions and their relevance for systems of social security. An investigation based on a case study of Senegal, Mali and Gabon .

This project has been built around the premise that by and large the present day social security systems in Africa are failing.

National Identities and State Formation

National identity is the set of inter-related cultural attributes that provides meaning and self-recognition to a collective of humans who define themselves as a national community.

Peace agreements instead of “amicable agreement”: Consociationalism after civil war

How can democracy and social peace survive in societies divided by race, ethnicity, religion, region, language or ideology?

People’s perceptions on sustainable intensification of genetically modified crops for food security and climate mitigation in Kenya

Worldwide, genetically modified (GM) crops are perceived as necessary for sustainable agriculture to enhance food security and mitigate climate change.

Planning the new, better city –Fear and safety in policy and practice

Kiruna, the northernmost city in Sweden, is constructed around a classic industrial source of production – the prosperous mine.

Rethinking Immigrant Integration in a Mass-Migration Era: Migrant Families in Comparative Perspective

In our era of mass migration, understanding migrant families’ efforts to forge and maintain meaningful social and civic ties is more important than ever.

Rethinking South African Literature(s)

This is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project, located in the Faculty of Arts at UWC, which seeks to rethink the ways in which we conceptualise and understand the field of South African literatures, almost three decades after the legislated ending of apartheid, and just over two decades after Michael Chapman’s landmark study, Southern African Literatures (1996), arguably the first (and last) study to engage thoroughly with literatures in all languages in the region.

Retooling Development Pathways for Sustainability transition in Africa

We are continuously witnessing a confluence of socio-economic and social-ecological crisis manifested in the form of growing environmental degradation, persistent economic stagnation, increasing unemployement and growing disparities between and within countries.

System Change Africa: Evolution not revolution

Finding an African way of dealing with African urbanism: Complexity theory and systems thinking show how governments and people can work together to achieve something that neither could ever achieve alone.

The complex economics of the public domain

Prominent economists (and US trade negotiators) assert that bad things happen when creative works fall into the public domain.

The Law of Commissions: A Comparative Study of the Place of Commissions in Law and Governance.

The purpose of this work is to explore the role of Commissions; interrogate existing Commission discourses; examine the power of Commissions and their place in law and governance; investigate the global developments of their legal and socio-political dimensions; a process that involves a holistic approach that probes and unpacks Commissions in their complexity.

The legacy and lessons of the Khulumani case

During its 12-year trajectory, the Khulumanicase has excited interest worldwide.

The new middle class in Africa in comparative perspective

Comparative perspectives from the global south can tell us much about the meteoric rise of the new middle class in Africa.

The Power of Injury: Memory, Decolonization, and the Challenges of Modernity in Africa

This book examines the political and social effects of Africa’s prioritization of the experience of colonization in its response to the world, and analyzes the role of Nelson Mandela’s notion of forgiveness in Africa’s inevitable path to modernity.

The Responsive University

There is a fairly substantial literature on the manner and extent to which universities engage with society.

The Responsive University

This project falls under the STIAS longer term theme project University and Society, sub-theme: Understanding the Contemporary University(From the concept note): Universities worldwide are relentlessly focused on attaining ‘excellence’.

The Wind Scatters

This envisaged collection will comprise of short stories set in different periods over a century, beginning from the 1920s to the 2020s.

The Zulus of New York/The Madonna of Excelsior Script

In 1880 William Leonard Hunt, known as The Great Farini after his trapeze act with a troupe called The Flying Farinis, a well-known Canadian funambulist and impresario, imported a group of Zulus to England and later to the United States to perform as part of the human curiosities or freak shows in his popular circus.

Three Paths to Constitutionalism

There are three paths to constitutionalism in the modern world.

Traditional Authorities and Decentralisation in Southern Africa

The proposed research project is a study of the recent resurgence of traditional authorities in southern Africa.

Transformative infrastructure for sustainable development in Africa

The infrastructure deficit in Africa is estimated to be $130-170 billion per year according to newly revised figures from the African Development Bank.

Transformative Infrastructure for Wellbeing Economy Development in Africa

The need for transformational change in national development efforts received unprecedented global consensus and support in 2015 resulting in the adoption of Agenda 2030 on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the signing of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change.

2017

“Dementia: a growing problem in South Africa and the world”

Prosperous people live longer and old age carries a high risk of dementia, a condition that is so far neither preventable nor curable.

3D Print a House for Development (3D - H - 4D): Prototyping Climate Change Adaptation in African Urban Planning

The news that a Chinese company has successfully 3D printed ten houses in 24 hours rapidly, cheaply and with a bare-bones workforce offers a window into the future for sustainable development in Africa’s urban planning.

A Social History of Democratic South African Told in Nine Lives

The book I am writing is a social history of the first two decades of South African democracy.

Addressing the Need for a Rapid Diagnostic for Childhood Tuberculosis

TB rates are at unprecedented high levels in sub Saharan Africa [2].

African Leapfrogging Index to Sustainability (ALIS)

Centre for Complex Systems in Transition of Stellenbosch University and the International Institute for Industrial Environmental Economics of Lund University are currently developing a regional project on Distributed Renewable Economy for Africa’s Transformation.

Aid Effectiveness and Policy Coherence for Development: Donor Policies and Practices in Comparative Perspective

This research project explores the extent to which donor countries’ aid and non-aid policies work together in the interests of development, as well as the extent to which donors work with each other and recipient governments.

Assessment of social-economic impacts of invasive cactus (Opuntia engelmannii) to rural livelihoods and their environment in the Drylands of Kenya

Invasive alien plant species are one of the major drivers of global ecosystem change and the most serious threats to ecological, economic and social well-being.

Asymmetric (Trans)Constitutionalism beyond Eurocentrism and Post-Colonialism

The research deals with the asymmetrical political relations in the world society and their impact on transconstitutional entanglements between legal orders.

Axis and Revolution

The themes of the collection Axis and Revolution, my fourth book of poetry, range from poetry as autobiography to the contemporary legacy of slavery, a topic that has engaged my critical as well as creative writing.

Bridging between the Physical and Biological Worlds

Living and non-living systems are strikingly different.

Cafe de Move On Blues

In Cafe de Move On Blues I plan to look at people like me, both English and Afrikaans whites, across the country, in an attempt to say who they are (and who they think they are) and how they react to life in the new South Africa.

Climate Change and the Emerging Disease Crisis: An Existential Threat to Technological Humanity

The emerging infectious disease (EID) crisis encompasses all pathogens affecting humans and the species upon which we depend for survival and socio-economic development.

Comparative regionalism: The political economy of regional security organizations

After the end of the Cold War a respacing of international politics has begun – a new world order is emerging that is increasingly described as multipolar.

Constitution-building in Africa: Corruption and constitutionalism in Africa – Revisiting control measures and strategies

The focus of the 2017 seminar under this project is on the theme, Corruption and constitutionalism in Africa: Revisiting control measures and strategies.

Controlling Landscapes and Bodies

During my time at STIAS I will collaborate with Stellenbosch and Cape Town faculty in both the humanities and the sciences to look at the positioning and chronology of Egyptian rock art in the Eastern Sahara in order to establish whether the animal or human images shown reflect changes in the environment and how it was manipulated, and ways in which this can be proven.

Creating a Liberal British Empire: Histories and Legacies

This book will address the question of how liberal society attempts to reconcile empire to its values and principles.

Developing an International Prognostic Scoring System for Thalassemia: A New Tool for Revisiting Classification of Thalassemia

Β-thalassemia is classified into three phenotypes, depending on the severity of symptoms: 1) thalassemia major (TM); 2) thalassemia Intermedia (TI); 3) β trait or thalassemia minor (Tm).

Devil With Blue Eyes

Devil With Blue Eyes is a novel of dislocation that seeks to explore and expose the rise of xenophobia in South Africa.

Dying to forget: History, memory and the intergenerational transfer of trauma in South Africa

THIS project is about the discipline of history and the intergenerational transfer of trauma in South Africa.

Faith and Fabric

Relations between faith and the fabric – whether political, social, economic, cultural or moral – of communities, societies and the global world are increasingly studied in many disciplines, not primarily because of the popular claim that religion is back and the fact that the so-called secularization theory is today rejected by many, but rather since many scholars increasingly recognize the public role of faith, not in the sense of religious convictions, communities and traditions, but in the sense of basic axioms and values, core beliefs and commitments (Taylor), cardinal convictions (Huber), notions of the sacred (Joas), in short, the faith of the faithless (Critchley).

Health in All policies: Healthy housing policies to address the risk and burden of infectious and non-communicable diseases

Urbanization is restructuring the nature of cities, particularly in South Africa (SA) and Africa, where informality is on the rise.

Hiraeth (a novel)

The creative project, a novel with the working title ‘Hiraeth’, is conceived of as a mythopeoic journey story undertaken by nine young misfits from different parts of the world, attending a private boarding school in Kenya, who are haunted by a common dream and the persistent summons of a honey-guide.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Meeting Long Term Challenges

Professor Ian Goldin is the Director of the Oxford Martin School and Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford.

Interrogating Blackness, Locating ‘Africanness’: Call-and-Response in the (literary) works of Toni Morrison and Zoë Wicomb, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Taiye Selasi

This project offers a fresh, comparative, transatlantic and transnational analysis of leading African-American author, Toni Morrison’s, work on blackness through the diasporic lens of contemporary female writers of the African diaspora, Zoë Wicomb, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Taiye Selasi.

Jazz Life

This is a book in progress replete with personal incident and an appreciation of South African jazz history and culture, musicians and the music played.

Jurisdictional Rivalries between Company and State

This contribution to the research theme Crossing Borders, centres on two questions posed explicitly by the subtheme, Boundaries and Legal Authority in a Global Context.

Law and World

The terms globe and world are used interchangeably in the contemporary discussion about legal globalizations.

Life in the transients

This project will explore a new theory of adaptation that I have termed Life in the Transients (LIT).

Mad Men: A South African Media History The aspirational syntax of men’s magazines: A South African media history, 1910 to the present

Men’s magazines had their official start in South Africa in 1910 with the inception of publications aimed at asserting the continued role of the Empire in establishing a benchmark of good taste.

Nietzsche and the alleged European nature of nihilism

I will elaborate Nietzsche’s idea of the European character of nihilism in discussion with philosophers from other cultures, or at least from other parts of the world (including Brazil and South Africa), who all are interested and prepared to cooperate.

On the charge accumulation and ion exchange in PEDOT electrodes

Supercapacitors are devices that reside on the border between capacitor technology and battery systems and are utilized in transportation and infrastructure applications.

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.

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 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.

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.

Contemporary law: the dialectic of unity and plurality

The simultaneous unity and plurality of law was a central topic for Hans Kelsen.

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.

DOHaD and SDGs: Moving towards Early Implementation

The Developmental Origins of Health and Disease & Sustainable Development Goals: Moving Towards Early ImplementationThe Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) paradigm provides us with a new and exciting way to think about causation of illness while at the same time providing us with both personal and population-level instruments for avoiding harm and promoting health.

Fiction Writing Project

I plan to write a novel based on the life and works of Thomas Pringle, popularly known as the Father of South African poetry.

Global Citizenship and the Practice of Being Human. South African Visions and the legacy of Enlightenment

This project addresses the idea of global citizenship and common humanity in South Africa today.

History of Scania

Scania is the southernmost province of Sweden.

Infectious Disease Prevention in Companion Animals

The project aims at campaigning for the acceptance of companion animal vaccination and its disease prevention aspects, thereby increasing the visibility of veterinary research in the One Medicine-One Health perspective.

Japanese firms, industrial systems and investments in Africa

It is well recognised that there is growing economic and political interaction between sub-Saharan Africa and states from the East Asian region.

Low cost nudges to patients to improve treatment adherence: do they work?

Universal health coverage and the growing burden of chronic illness are both at the top of the global health agenda.

Making primary health care work for the poor

South Africa’s poor health outcomes have traditionally been attributed to poverty, unequal and ineffective spending and the high disease burden, but increasingly it is recognized that the public health system may also be contributing to such problems by delivering services that do not always conform to the stipulated standards.

Many Modernities ‐ Religious freedom in South Africa and Sweden

In Europe with a history of religious wars and big national churches, freedom of religion is often understood as freedom from, at least from institutional religion.

Mobilizing for Natural Resource Management at the Micro-level in Rural Africa

Natural resource management (NRM) involves efforts by different institutions to formulate and implement laws, policies and legislation to ensure viable use of natural resources.

Noiseless optical amplifiers and their applications

Optical amplifiers are essential in optical communication systems that serve as the backbone of the Internet.

Nutritional Security in a Profitable and Sustainable Food System

The South African Food system is designed to ensure that the country’s population is well-nourished, that farming is a viable livelihood and that the environment is protected.

Opposition in African Politics: The Case of Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa and Kenya

This research examines the idea of opposition in African politics against the backdrop of problems inherent in the democratization process in contemporary Africa with a view to analyzing their dimensions and implications for the development of the continent and her peoples.

Promoting peace, security and development in Africa: challenges, and constraints to South Africa’s African Agenda

The purpose of this research project is to (further) explore aspects of South Africa’s African policy over the past two decades, specifically within the frameworks of its African Agenda and its white paper on foreign policy, The Diplomacy of Ubuntu.

Rethinking Sex in Uganda’s Parliament

How do parliaments think about sexualities, sexual citizenship, sexual rights and sexual norms over time and space within the African continent?

Science and development: Growth, expansion and role of university systems in emerging economies

The challenge of economic growth for middle income countries includes technological upgrading, which, in turn, demands expansion and improvement of the higher education and science system.

South Africa and the emergence of international human rights

Time at STIAS will be devoted to the final updating and revision of a syllabus entitled The International Protection of Human Rights: A Critical Approach, which was used in 2015 at the College of Law of the National University of Taiwan in Taipei, to be published as a book in 2016 by Intersentia (Antwerp, Cambridge, Portland).

Swedish Naturalists in South Africa 1771–1851

The South African flora and fauna have been studied by a number of Swedish naturalists the last 250 years.

The “As-If” reality of puppet theatre

While at STIAS Jane Taylor will be launching creative/intellectual projects involving object theatre and puppetry arts.

The Heartbeat of a Storm

After writing five novels, a collection of short stories and a musical, which largely drew from South Africas troubled past, I will use the period at STIAS to write a semi-autobiographical (or novelized) account of the use of technology or forensic science to make sense of our past and of our future.

The legitimacy and authority of international criminal law

This project is part of a longer-term research agenda, which interrogates the legitimacy and authority of international criminal law.

The right to have rights: from migration to integration

One of the key tasks of my stay at STIAS will be to work on a project that addresses the normative and institutional basis of what Hannah Arendt calls the right to have rights.

The role of natural selection in the origin of species

The splitting of one biological species into two, speciation, is a central process in evolutionary biology.

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.

Transcultural Affinity: Cosmopolitan Imagination in South Africa

My project examines the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity in South Africa.

Transitional Justice: Accountability for wrongdoing in the aftermath of conflict

Alternative methods of justice, such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and amnesties, have been used in the aftermath of several conflicts, including in the wake of Apartheid.

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!

What Keeps Society Together? Societal Cohesion, South Africa as a Challenging Case.

My overall research interest is about societal cohesion, what keeps a society together.

Wildness

In this project, I engage with the concept of ‘wildness’, initially in the very problematic ways in which it is often used, but then more substantially in its possibilities for (re)thinking human, plant and animal identities, including in ways which decentre the human.

2015

51 Poets: an Anthology of World Poetry

For a Latin American publisher I have undertaken to compile an anthology of world poetry.

A comparative study of donor and state policies and operational approaches to addressing forced displacement due to armed conflict in the Horn of Africa

The global population of forcibly displaced persons due to armed conflict is about 44 million, comprising about 15.

A convergence of interest between expressivism and pragmatism

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in pragmatism, both historically and in its contemporary form, particularly as it has developed through the work of Bob Brandom, Huw Price, Michael Williams and others.

Acting on Stage

Role-playing on stage, e.g. an actor playing Shakespeare’s Richard III, clearly differs from role-playing in real life, e.

African Constitutionalism: Comparative Perspectives (2)

The main project that I have engaged in at STIAS since 2013 falls under the general theme, African Constitutionalism: Comparative Perspectives.

Analysing sub-Saharan African states through a limited access lens

During the past decade, an extraordinary disconnect regarding the futures of states in sub-Saharan Africa has emerged: ‘Aspiring Africa, the world’s fastest growing continent’ (in the words of The Economist on its title page), on the one hand, and, in the words of an economist, ‘informalised and subsistence Africa, with swathes of survivalist pockets of existence, remains the overriding economic reality’ in these states, on the other.

Battling homophobia in the bid to protect East Africa's sexual minorities: A socio-legal analysis

Recent political and judicial battles over the rights of sexual minorities in East Africa have witnessed the introduction of new constricting legislation, judicial interventions and civil society action both in favour and against the expansion of the ‘right to love.

Cape Town’s Creole Songs, Nederlandsliedjies and moppies

Following up on the publication of Sounding the Cape, Music, Identity and Politics in South Africa ( African Minds, Somerset West, 2013) researched and published with support by STIAS, this project will focus on two song repertoires emblematic of Cape Town’s music: the Moppies (or comic songs) and the Nederlandslierdjies.

Contingency and Uncertainty: Working with and against the state in South Africa

This project asks the question: under what circumstances, with what political resources, and under what kinds of assumptions are women able to make claims on the state to address gender inequalities?

Deeply equitable development: water provision and biodiversity offsetting in South Africa

Fulfilling human rights to a clean and healthy environment while sustaining that environment for present and future generations of humans and non-humans is unambiguously worthwhile until a nation tries to achieve these goals simultaneously.

Democracy at the Crossroads? Normative, performance and legitimacy changes in contemporary democracies

Current crises can hardly be reduced to fiscal or economic phenomena; they seem to be much deeper, including the crisis of democracy per se.

Dichotomies in biology and the origin of life problem

Advances in synthetic biology have brought the long-standing ‘Origin of Life’ problem once again into prominence.

Faith and Food: The Intersectionality of Belief, Politics, Security and Human Flourishing in Africa

To think of oneself primarily as a human being is to discount, in some way, the significance of the divisions we otherwise maintain between people.

Fiction and Reality of Mobility in Africa

The aim of this project is to explore how to marry ethnography and fiction in understanding the intricacies, nuance and complexity of African mobility and mobile Africans as frontier beings.

Generating Knowledge: Conservation Sciences in South Africa’s National Parks

Over many years a considerable body of reliable scientific information has been generated in or about South Africa’s national parks, both by scientists employed by the organization and by outside researchers working with SANParks.

HIV prevention and treatment: from policy to implementation

During my residency at STIAS I will be analyzing data and completing two scientific papers on HIV prevention, in particular the prevention of mother to child transmission (PMTCT) in sub-Saharan Africa, specifically in Kenya and Tanzania where I have ongoing projects and data is being collected.

In Pursuit of a Global Civics

We are the luckiest generation in human history.

Innovations: Key to structural change and prosperity

One of the key activities during my stay at STIAS is, together with Margareta Norell Bergendahl, to finalize the agenda of the up-coming Round Table meeting to be held at STIAS in February 2016.

Labour after Globalisation: new forms of organisation, new sources of power

In this book-length manuscript a puzzle will be dealt with, namely: the continuing decline of traditional trade unionism in advanced industrial countries, side by side with the growth of a new scholarship on global labour.

Learning a sign language: the challenge of modality

The study of sign languages contributes to our understanding of the human language faculty.

Medical Pluralism, Maternal and Child Health, and Demographic Developments in Southeast Africa, 1890-present

Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable is the 11th goal of the draft Sustainable Development Goals.

Multilingual ecologies

Languages change and adapt as they exist in the minds and practices of multilinguals.

Mutual innovation capacity building

One of the key assignments for my stay at STIAS will be to work out a proposal for the final agenda and format for a Round Table (RT) meeting to be held at STIAS in February 2016 together with Pontus Braunerhjelm.

New approaches to anti-obesity therapeutics – Part 2

Obesity is a medical condition defined as the excessive accumulation of fat that presents a risk to health.

On Social Meaning – Ernst Cassirer, Cornelius Castoriadis and Philosophical-Rhetorical Anthropology

In rhetorical theory, the question of how meaning is produced has traditionally been dealt with in terms of the intentions of the orator to influence her or his audience through speech.

Property – Obstacle or Key to Success for South Africa's Constitutional Democracy?

The inclusion of a clause protecting the deprivation of property in South Africa’s Constitution was controversial.

Science in South Africa – a synoptic history

The history of science and of scientific knowledge in South Africa is a growing field of interest but it remains relatively fragmented.

South African – Swedish effort on pre-hospital diagnostics of stroke and traumatic injuries

Stroke care represents one of the major global unmet challenges of the global health care system.

South African Literature after the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The role of literature is always to speak the truth to power (Nietzsche), and even if it cannot pretend to ameliorate material problems it appears to have impact on the way readers respond to reality and even perhaps behave in the real world.

Systems biology studies on plant desiccation tolerance for food security

Drought is the single greatest threat to world agriculture (FAO, 2008) and this is predicted to be increasingly exacerbated by the effects of global climate change.

The bioarchaeology of South Africa

Perched, inconveniently, at opposite ends of the globe, Scotland and South Africa are nonetheless ‘sisters-in-law’ in the sense that their systems of private law are uncannily close.

The Impact of the Global Recession on Party Policy Preferences

The project continues and wants to bring to an end a project that has been started at STIAS in March 2013.

The malaise of the human condition: Social diagnostics, human evolution and theological discourse on the contingency of “sin”

Social diagnostics gained some currency in the South African context through the Diagnostic Report (2011) produced by the National Planning Commission.

The modern practice of intervention by invitation and its implications for the prohibition of the use of force

The research examines how the criteria for permissible military intervention by invitation as developed in international law doctrine are currently implemented by States, as well as how this impacts the prohibition of the use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of States.

The nature of randomness and fundamental physical limits of secrecy

People have always been fascinated by randomness and intrigued by the fundamental question – is any outcome that appears random to us only so by virtue of our ignorance, or do there exist experiments whose outcome is inherently unpredictable to any observers, no matter how powerful or omniscient they might be?

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 transition to Green Economy: Africa’s leapfrogging opportunity

Africa is currently recognized as the fastest growing region in the world while a number of African countries are listed amongst the fastest growing economies in the region over the last decade.

The work and legacy of Sesotho writer Thomas Mofolo

Dunton and Krog are to edit for peer review and publication a set of papers delivered at a conference held in Lesotho on the work of Sesotho writer Thomas Mofolo.

Toward reducing infant mortality via smart and low-cost pulse oximetry

Sepsis kills over six million children in the developing world every year, many of those die at home and thus it is believed that a distributed, community‐based intervention would be most effective in reducing mortality.

Traditional leadership, democracy and development in the rural eastern Cape: a study of futures past

The problem of how to marry constitutional democracy with traditional authorities in the postcolonial context is not unique to South Africa and has been substantially explored in other contexts.

Ubuntu commercial nests in African indigenous markets in Nairobi: alternative business model for an emerging ‘African metropolis’

This research proposes that there is an ‘African metropolis’ that has been struggling for space and ascendancy in the City of Nairobi.

Understanding clinical quality of care in public primary health care facilities in South Africa

This study considers the reliability of a standardised client approach to inform policy makers about the quality of the clinical encounter at primary healthcare centres in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape metro areas.

Understanding Southern welfare – social policies in Brazil, India, China and South Africa

A mid-term research programme focusing on the ideational foundations of social policies beyond traditional Northern welfare will be fleshed out.

Writing Across Borders – In Praise of Impurity

The idea of combining and possibly merging ‘ethnography’ and ‘fiction’ emanates from my research on literature’s role in the transition processes of South Africa and Argentina (Fiction and Truth in Transition : Writing the present past in South Africa and Argentina,2012), which brought me in the end, to my own surprise, to the crossroads of Literature and Anthropology.

2014

Animal, Mineral or Vegetable?

During my time at STIAS I will collaborate with Stellenbosch faculty in both the humanities and the sciences to examine ancient Egyptian mummies, particularly those belonging to animals.

Anticipation. How Individuals and Communities Use the Future

The future is incorporated into all phenomena, conscious or unconscious, physical or ideational, as anticipation, from those forms of anticipation that are observed, for instance, in a tree that loses its leaves in the Autumn to human planning that colonizes the future inspired by imaginary futures.

Apocalyptic themes in the global warming debate

There is major controversy in America today over global warming.

Basic questions of ethics

Today ethics have to be formulated for pluralistic societies that encompass a variety of religions and worldviews including the secular option.

Basic questions of ethics (2)

Work at STIAS will be devoted to additional contributions for English and Chinese translations of the book Ethics.

Celebrating South African outsider artists: Helen Martins and Nukain Mabusa

In 1972, the British scholar Roger Cardinal coined the term outsider art as an English equivalent of art brut, French artist Jean Dubuffet’s term for artists creating extraordinary work outside the boundaries of mainstream western art.

Challenges and opportunities for the transport sector

The issue of sustainable energy supply is a global problem for pursuing future endeavours in the energy area.

Decolonial thoughts

Work at STIAS will be the final draft of four lectures which were delivered in 2013 at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa (CISA) in Johannesburg under the general topic of Decolonial Thoughts.

Deconstructing Shadows: Human behaviour through the prism of evolution

This project involves an in-depth analysis of human behaviour from an evolutionary perspective, as a basis for integrating our modern understanding of behavioural psychology with its neurobiological basis.

Developing a Theory of Landscape Demography

Many populations of wild organisms exist as scattered populations spread across landscapes.

Discovery and ethical dimensions of the natural sciences

The archives of Nobel Prizes have been used for the production of two books, Nobel Prizes and Life Sciences(2010) and Nobel Prizes and Nature’s Surprises (2013).

Education, Skills and Inequality in the Labour Market

The race between education and technology is a key factor in determining earnings inequality.

Elie Metchnikoff: A Passionate Scientist

Elie Metchnikoff, Nobel laureate in Medicine and Physiology in 1908, is the father of innate immunity, the rapid, but non-specific defense against infection.

Emerging Statistical Renaissance in Africa

The project is about completing the writing of a book entitled Emerging Statistical Renaissance in Africa.

Ethnic differences in obesity-related complications in South African women

Obesity is closely linked the development of type 2 diabetes (T2D), a leading cause of death worldwide.

Ethnicity and Constitutionalism in Africa

The focus of the study for this year, under the broad theme of constitution-building in Africa will be the issue of separation of powers.

Exploring interpretations of the constitution and the bible as “sacred texts” in constructing (un)equal gendered environments

Culture, religion, gender, ethnicity, race and history influence processes of identity formation and social relationships.

Falls and related consequences in old age

Older populations are expanding all over the world.

Food and nutrition security in rural communities

A book is being developed which takes into account multiple objectives of providing enough food at household and individual level, an acceptable monetary income and sustainable production under the constraints of limited access to resources (land, credit, water, technology, information, level of education and more), dependency on remittances and social security programs, and limited access to markets.

Garment of Destiny

Work on a new single-author book with a working title of Garment of Destiny will be started.

Global Human Rights Law and the Boundaries of Statehood

How does a transformation of the boundaries of statehood contribute to recovering the public and political nature of human rights law beyond the international legal order of territorial states?

God, Spies and Lies: How journalists and politicians fought South Africa’s war of ideas, 1800-2015

In the light of the political impasse gripping the country, this study investigates the ideas that made democratic South Africa, through the largely unexplored interaction between its journalists and politicians.

Health transition and injury care and prevention

Apart from making important contributions to morbidity and mortality world-wide (WHO), injuries as a health problem have special characteristics (Byass et al.

High-Resolution Laboratory X-Ray Bio-Imaging

This project concerns methods to obtain higher spatial resolution and improved contrast when imaging thick biological samples – a classical and generic bio-imaging problem.

Hypervalent Iodine Compounds as Green Reagents in Organic Synthesis

The need for environmentally benign methodology to perform reactions in organic chemistry is continuously increasing, in order to minimize health and climate effects caused by the chemical industry.

Impact of sustainable intensification of food production on environment and human well-being

Africa, once considered the breadbasket of the world, is now strongly affected by problems with food insecurity and malnutrition.

It’s the Education, Stupid! Martin Luther’s unfinished business

At the beginning of the 21th century mankind is confronted with a number of global challenges.

Kingfisher Tales

The Greek myth of the European Kingfisher has inspired many poets and writers and left deep traces in European culture.

Listening

It is planned to begin a book called Listening during the stay at STIAS which will present, in a form accessible to readers with diverse interests, a method of psychological inquiry that was developed with graduate students at Harvard and taught for many years.

Lonely Death: An Ecology of Living and Dying in Post-Miracle Japan

Stories of lonely death (kodokushi) are commonplace in what is considered an era of increasing isolation and social disconnectedness in post-Bubble Japan.

Migration Stories: The US Visa Lottery and Global Citizenship

A book about Togolese who apply for the US Diversity Visa lottery will be completed.

Monetary Policy in African Countries: Theory, Practice and Impact

The prevailing macroeconomic frameworks in African countries may be generally characterized as a do no harm approach to policy.

Multiscale Modeling in Tribology

Roughly 30% of global energy consumption today is friction - a colossal loss.

Playing at/against power: Histories of Trauma and Abuse in South African Music-Pedagogical Spaces

This project will focus on a widespread myth, namely that Sweden is a country mainly without corruption and involved internationally in corruption only because of the demands from corrupt governments and people in the rest of the world.

Post-apartheid state engagement with customary structures

This project will contribute to a greater comparative understanding of state-customary knowledge and its challenges in Africa by way of a study of the experience of the post-apartheid State in this regard.

Rethinking Development in the Global Information Age: Implications for Africa

This seminar conducted by Manuel Castells is a follow-up to his previous STIAS seminar Informational Development and Human Development: South Africa in a Global Perspective (24–26 August 2011).

School Photos and their Afterlives: Assimilation, Exclusion, Resistance

Appearing very early in the history of photography and pervasive throughout the world, school-class photos, like report cards and diplomas, confirm group belonging and exposure to a process of educational acculturation and socialization.

Social-ecological systems and biosphere stewardship

Humanity interacts with the dynamics of the biosphere in new ways.

Some Thoughts and Reflections about Chemistry in Africa

There is little one can read about the history and the pioneers of chemistry in Africa and even that is mostly written by non-Africans.

Synthesis, Design, and Resource Optimization in Batch Chemical Plants

The project at STIAS will involve writing a research book aimed at closing a glaring scientific gap in the area of batch chemical process.

The Aesthetics of Violence: Art, Fiction and Film

One can identify an ‘aesthetics’ of violence in any representation of a violent act where form and textuality are essential elements to the experience to the representation.

The becoming of post-apartheid jurisprudence: Towards a minor jurisprudence of generosity

The project focuses on the interdisciplinary possibilities of law to constitute a discourse of transformation for post-apartheid South Africa.

The Death Drill (a novel)

During the stay at STIAS research and writing on the historical novel ‘The Death Drill, inspired by and based on the sinking of the SS Mendi, a battle ship carrying members of the South African Native Labour Corps, will be continued.

The Foundations of Virology

At STIAS the text of an extended online edition (eBook) of the historic research work, ‘The Foundations of Medical and Veterinary Virology: Discoverers and Discoveries, Inventors and Inventions, Developers and Technology’will be written.

The indirect responsibility of States parties to Human Rights Treaties

Supervisory organs of international human rights treaties have recognised the extraterritorial effects of the prohibition of torture and recently also of the right to a fair trial.

The Porcupine is a Monkey

The aim of the work I would undertake while at Stellenbosch would be to complete the argument of a new book, whose title is The Porcupine is a Monkey.

The provision of ecosystem services and poverty alleviation

How society chooses to use land and allocate resources drives economic development and environmental quality.

The Scientific Method in Biology and Biomedicine

Philosophers tend to explain the success of the scientific enterprise in terms of a so-called scientific method believed to be typical of physics and chemistry.

The Scientific Method in Biology and Biomedicine (2)

Work on the book ‘The Scientific Method in Biology and Biomedicine’ will be continued.

The short history of evidence-based veterinary vaccinology

The project is concerned with vaccinology in the public eye.

Voices

After focusing almost exclusively on the instrumental medium for forty years, I will use the forthcoming STIAS artist residency as an opportunity to concentrate on the voice - and the choir in particular.

Water Governance in the Face of Global Change: From Understanding to Transforming

The sustainable management of global water resources is one of the most pressing environmental challenges of the 21st century.

2013

101 Detectives

The main project I undertook at STIAS was a collection of short fictions called 101 Detectives.

A Critical Metals Analysis for South Africa

Modern technology makes use of nearly the entire periodic table of the elements.

African Constitutionalism: Comparative Perspectives

The general focus is on examining critical issues affecting the promotion of constitutionalism in Africa from a comparative perspective.

Being South African: Moving Beyond Race

This project is about South African identity and the key question to be answered would be: what does it mean to be South African as opposed to a white, coloured, African or Indian South African?

Biological Chemistry: Metal transport by proteins

While DNA contains the genetic information, a large number of different proteins are the ‘workhorses’ in living organisms executing the orders given through the DNA code.

Closing the Narrative Loop: Indian and South African Constitutionalism in the Age of Reflexive Globalisation

It is planned to use the time at STIAS to find out whether something like an African type of constitutionalism is developing or whether constitutionalism in Africa develops more or less along the lines of Western constitutionalism.

Conceptafrica

The target and at the same time the tool of the project is the conceptualisations and imaginations of the social and the economic in various African languages.

Conjuring majorities: Life, infrastructure, and relational politics in the urban South

A joint book manuscript ‘Conjuring majorities: life, infrastructure, and relational politics in the urban South’ (with AbdouMaliq Simone) will be completed.

Constitutional protection of economic and social rights in South Africa

This proposal forms part of a larger project on economic and social rights in general, and the right to housing in particular.

Crime-focused Law and Colonial Sovereignty at the Cape of Good Hope, circa 1795-1810

Through quasi-inquisitorial procedures for identifying particular subjects as criminals, law at the Cape circa 1795-1810 fashioned hierarchies of criminals in the name of a particular sovereign’s justice.

Dry Remains – The forensic examination of the moral content of a life

After fifty years of writing plays the forthcoming stay at STIAS will be used to make a second attempt at writing a novel.

Flexibly-bounded Rationality and Marginalisation of Irrationality Theories for Decision Making

In this study the theory of flexibly-bounded rationality which is an extension to the theory of bounded rationality is studied.

From Limited Government to Social Justice and Development: Progressive Constitutionalism in the Era of Globalisation

While Southern countries have largely failed to bring about a new international economic order, they have been more successful in shaping the international agenda in the field of human rights, from the Convention for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination to the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and its recent Protocol.

Gender and Work in Early Modern Sweden: The case of lower civil servant households

It is often believed that in the past, women were confined to the home and supported by their husbands (the male breadwinner model).

Historical Novel - Research and Writing

While at STIAS a novel will be researched and written.

How to survive the post growth century

The 20th century will be seen by historians as the century of growth.

Infectious causes of human cancers: results and perspectives

During the past decades it became evident that at least 21% of the global cancer incidence is linked to viral, bacterial and parasitic infections.

Invertebrate motor control and inhibitory motoneurons

The miniaturisation of animal body cells is limited, and as a consequence, muscle and nerve cells are of similar diameters in large and small animals, to within an order of magnitude.

Is there a future for the project of a clinical anthropology (‘patho-analysis of existence’)

Is it still possible and meaningful, as traditional psychoanalytic theory implies, to understand the relation between psychopathology and (philosophical) anthropology in a positive and structural way?

Legal Traditions and the New Logics

Over the last three centuries western legal thinking has been driven by notions of nation-states, national legal systems and classical forms of logic.

Making up people

Work on the ways in which classifications of people affect the people classified, in particular the ways that individuals think of themselves, and how this affects their actions, and open up or close off possible futures will be continued.

mHealth for Burn Diagnostic and Care in South Africa

In resource-poor settings, poor and marginalised populations have little access to burn injury emergency care, which is crucial to achieve the best possible clinical outcomes.

Multifunctionality in managed grassland systems: Biodiversity and ecosystem services

Grassland systems have been in focus for a long time due to their ecological, socioeconomic and cultural importance.

Nietzsche’s ‘Christian virtues’

Although Nietzsche is admittedly one of the most anti-Christian thinkers in the history of philosophy, this does certainly not mean that Christianity has not left traces in his thinking.

Novel approaches to stabilize atherosclerotic plaques

Cardiovascular disease has for many years been the leading cause of death in western societies and the incidence is now also rapidly increasing in many developing countries.

On Our Own

This is a writing project that would examine South African politics in exile and how that had an impact on the relationship of political parties inside the country.

Punishment and Legitimacy: A Kantian Perspective

This project seeks to contribute to our understanding of the moral values that underpin procedural rights in criminal trials, with a particular focus on the sentencing process.

Quantum Chaos in Many-Body Systems

The concept of chaos in classical mechanics is well defined.

Questions of Literature

This project will involve the further exploration of a number of issues treated briefly in the 2004 study ‘The Singularity of Literature’, a short book that examined the distinctive character of literary uses of language, emphasizing the interrelated trinity of inventiveness, singularity and alterity.

Reinstating the "Literary" in South African Literary Studie

South African literary studies has, in a sense, lost its intellectual project.

Revised edition of the book ‘Biochemical Oscillations and Cellular Rhythms’

A second edition of the book (entitled Biochemical Oscillations and Cellular Rhythms.

Social organising and criminal cooperation

This research draws upon a general theoretical interest in organisation outside of organisations paired with an ambition to better understand the formation of criminal organising or cooperation.

South Africa in the Region. Gateway or Gatekeeper?

The main purpose of this project is to analyse South Africa’s Foreign Policy towards its own region and towards Latin America (Brazil and Argentina) on a comparative basis and to discuss its role as a regional-middle-emerging power: Leadership?

South African social policies from a human rights perspective

The apartheid regime of South Africa persistently abstained from ratifying any of the major human rights treaties elaborated under the aegis of the United Nations after 1948.

The cellular and molecular connectome of somatic sensation

The underlying circuitry for somatic sensation remains a mystery.

The Early History of Astronomy at the Cape of Good Hope

The project involves the writing of a major monograph, commissioned by the Brenthurst Press in Johannesburg, on the history of astronomy and navigation at the Cape of Good Hope from the late fifteenth century until the middle of the nineteenth century - encompassing times when European expeditions came to the Cape to study the southern sky.

The impact of a global economic crisis on political parties in competitive democracies

The research project deals with the impact of a severe global economic crisis on political parties in representative democracies.

The Importance of Being Modern: A Chronicle of Contemporary India

This project involves the writing of a rather particular anthropological history of contemporary India.

The Performance of Democracies

Over the last century, several waves of democracy have swept over the globe, bringing representative democracy to places where it seemed inconceivable.

The role of international law in the settlement of conflict: Apartheid South Africa, Namibia and Palestine

This study concerns the question whether the manner in which international law informed political consensus in South Africa and Namibia is of relevance to the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict.

The sense of beauty in the Nederlansliedjies of Cape Town’s sangkore

Nederlandsliedjiesare one of the two most important repertoires of creole songs which feature in the competitions of the Sangkore (also called: Nagtroepe, Hollandse Teams or Malay Choirs); they are also the repertoire that raises the strongest emotions among listeners and singers belonging to the group that was labelled coloured during apartheid.

The State of Mathematical Sciences Research and Research Training at South African Universities

This investigation follows up on two reports that appeared in 2008 and 2009.

Towards designing and managing food security in South Africa: a critical analysis of a complex situation

While South Africa is food secure at a national level this is not the case for many households.

Understanding Non-Contractual Obligations: Unjust Enrichment and the Law of Torts in Comparative and Historical Perspective

Whereas the European and South African law of contracts is today seen as normatively integrated part of the law of obligations that can be explained coherently on the basis of an overarching theory or a set of intellectually related principles, the rest of the law of obligations is apparently still understood as resulting from various causes that are normatively independent and difficult to explain.