Projects

This project thinks through the space of the lift as urban affective infrastructure in Johannesburg over the 20th century. Using archival research, newspaper accounts, literary representations, films and...

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

This book-length project is tentatively titled Metaquestions: The Space of Thought in Philosophy and Beyond. The nature and process of questioning has been taken for granted as a core aspect of philosophy,...

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...

The global prevalence of type 2 diabetes (T2D) is increasing, with sub-Saharan Africa having the highest projected increase. Notably, the way T2D develops differs by ethnicity, but risk stratification...

What makes us human? We have long known that humanity’s uniqueness–language and our openended creativity–arose from our ancestors in Southern Africa, a generative promiscuity pervading all we...

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. By expanding...

Race Changes is a book about people whose seemingly permanent racial or ethnic identities in fact change over the course of their lifetimes. Sometimes it is just a matter of changing racial rules from...

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...

Sign languages, the visual-gestural languages of Deaf communities, lack a written form. Therefore, until recently, it was not possible to “capture” these languages. The advent of digitised video recordings,...

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...

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...