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2023
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.
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.
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 Geopolitics of Language and Literature Migration
The Anglophone diaspora arose during the period we identify as the Anthropocene.
The political economy of oral health in sub-Saharan Africa – uncovering the silent oral health crisis and exposing reasons for low public health priority
Oral diseases are among the most common and among the most neglected diseases of mankind.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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).