Projects

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.This project will...

Many parts of Africa are today not connected to an electricity grid. Both, centralized energy systems with extended energy distribution networks, which are common in other parts of the world, and decentralized...

Gold dominated South Africa for a century. Hundreds of thousands of people from across Southern Africa laboured in the bowels of the earth to extract it, recruited through an extensive, highly organised...

Surprisingly little is known about how the South African publishing industry has operated over the past 35 politically tumultuous years. Yet the value of publishing as a cultural benefit and an adjunct...

This project addresses the paradox of being intelligible to interlocutors who speak a language incapable of rendering my world intelligible. I draw from Kwasi Wiredu’s concept of “untranslatability”...

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....

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;...

Wetting phenomena are ubiquitous in nature and in our manufactured technological environment. Every instance of contact between substances composed of molecules or larger artificial particles presents...

This project addresses the question of what constitutes good scientific reasoning. The starting point is the observation that scientific reasoning takes place in the realm of uncertainty: We do not know...

The purpose of this project is to analyze the construction of black identity in 21st – century France. It questions the premises of a whole body of knowledge that still subscribes to the French Republic’s...

Globally there are calls for incentives for biodiversity conservation, including the mobilization of financial resources to implement biodiversity targets effectively. Multi-level governance has long been...

Most species occur in subdivided (fragmented) populations. For many years I have been studying local adaptation in such populations. In my individual project I want to bring this to a new level, by exploring...