Projects

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.

Erik J. Olsson

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.

Cedric de Coning

Around the world, gender inequality continues to shape individual opportunities, families, and societies.

Jody Heymann Amy Raub David Gordon

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

Katja Petzold

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

Kafilat Adebola Bawa-Allah

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

Sandra Swart

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

Jess Auerbach

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

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes

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

Jerry Ochola

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

Barbara König

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

Mario Giampietro Aloisius Louie Richard Sikora Ansel Renner

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?

Simon Bekker

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.

Sandra Waxman

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

Qingxiu Bu Kathleen Thelen

FINDING HOMER is a contemporary music-theater work.

Karmina Šilec

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.

Knut Nustad

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).

Poul Kjaer

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’.

William Beinart

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

Anthea Garman

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.

Carlos Ibanez

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

Ashleigh Harris

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

Joseph Rosen

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

Moses Khisa

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.

Nicole Beardsworth

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.

Andreas Freytag Abena Oduro

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

Denise Meyerson

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

Wolfram Weisse

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.

Mikael Persson

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

Maria Olaussen

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.

Jan-Bart Gewald

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.

Torsten Meireis

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.

Thomas Eriksen

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.

Saleem Badat

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

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

Mkhululi Mabija Paul Castles

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.

Løchlann Jain

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.

Barbara (Bibi) Burger

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

Jonas Olofsson

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

Joanna Rorbach

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.

Silvia Tomášková

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).

Jonathan Kingdon

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

Aili Mari Tripp