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2024
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.
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.
Implant Associated Infections
The aim research project is to find new ways to prevent and treat implant associated infections.
Reframing the Right to Education in International Law (and Deconstructing “Cultural Rights” More Broadly)
Changed circumstances since the adoption of the primary international human rights treaties, a multitude of scattered education rights norms, and distinct new challenges require a reframing of the right to education in international law.
Representing Abortion as an Ordinary Experience to Achieve Reproductive Justice
The way we talk about abortion needs to change.
Seaports and Development: Nigeria and Angola since the 1980s
Can seaports function as growth poles outside the Traditional Maritime Nations?
Space and temporality in family language policy: Multilingualism, linguistic repertoires and lived experiences
With increased transnational migration in recent years, children growing up with more than one language has become more and more common as people cross borders, integrate into new cultural-linguistic landscapes, form intermarriages and partnerships, and create multilingual families.
Species delimitation from genetic data – a quantitative assessment of a spatiotemporal approach
Despite its fundamental status in biology, the species category definition remains controversial and quantitative methods to test species status are in their infancy.
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.
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.
KROTOA IS PRESENT: A 17th Century story that refuses to die
The story of Krotoa !Goa /gõas
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.
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).
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.
Reviewing poverty as a human-nature disaster to achieve sustainable livelihood outcomes
Ending poverty has been the world’s priority for decades.
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 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.