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Reconceptualizing Quarry Stone Fines as Strategic Secondary Resources for Low-Carbon Concrete Infrastructure in Africa: A Circular Economy Systems Approach
The rapid expansion of infrastructure across Africa has intensified the extraction of natural aggregates while simultaneously generating large volumes of quarry stone fines that are commonly treated as waste. This dual challenge reflects a broader structural inefficiency within construction material systems, where valuable secondary resources remain underutilized. Grounded in circular economy principles, this research programme seeks to reconceptualize quarry stone flours not merely as aggregate substitutes, but as strategic secondary resources capable of supporting low-carbon, resource-efficient concrete infrastructure in African contexts. The programme integrates materials science, civil engineering, and sustainability systems thinking to develop a coherent framework for the responsible upcycling of stone flours in concrete production. Experimental investigations on the physical, fresh-state, mechanical, and microstructural performance of stone flour-based concretes will be conducted
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Bio/Psycho/Social: Toward a southern African anthropological theory of life and life-giving
The project Bio/Psycho/Social builds on my work in the broad field of reproduction studies, framed in terms of “the First Thousand Days of Life”. It aims to investigate the conceptual apparatus concerned with ‘life’ – as inheritance, illness, population and care. Postgenomic science requires a concept of the social that is adequate to the task of representing lifeworlds beyond the reductionist frame of ‘social determinants of health’. We need a theory of the social that can do justice to worlding’s complex and lively processes, one that draws from local conceptions of what it means to be human and in relation with others, especially as those others are child-bearing persons and infants. It is critical that our theorising takes proper account of African epistemologies and lifeways. By interrogating 'biopsychosocial' as an oft-used concept that brings different domains into relation in the interests of human well-being, I will address the adequacy of our conceptual frameworks. The work w
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Living with Disease: Rethinking Endemicity and the Mathematics of “Permanent Epidemics” in African Contexts
Global infectious disease research is largely structured around the logic of outbreaks: sudden events that demand rapid control, elimination, and return to “normal.” Yet in much of Africa, including Nigeria, many infectious diseases—such as malaria, Lassa fever, and cholera—are not exceptional events but enduring features of social, ecological, and economic life. This project proposes a conceptual and mathematical rethinking of infectious disease dynamics by shifting the focus from outbreaks to endemicity, understood as a condition of long-term co-existence rather than a temporary crisis. Using mathematical modelling as a central analytical tool, the project will examine how standard epidemiological frameworks implicitly assume stability, compliance, and institutional capacity that often do not hold in contexts of structural inequality. It will develop alternative modelling perspectives that better capture chronic instability, seasonal resurgence, multi-pathogen environments, and adapt
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From Lungs to Mind: Developing a Multi-Omics and 3PM Framework for Respiratory Infections and Neurodegenerative Risk in Africa
This interdisciplinary project seeks to bridge microbiology, virology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to investigate how respiratory infections; particularly RSV and emerging viruses, impact long-term brain health through the lung-brain axis. In Africa, where respiratory illnesses are prevalent and neurodegenerative disorders are under-studied, this research aims to develop a Predictive, Preventive, Personalized Medicine (3PM) framework using multi-omics data (microbiome, metabolome, genomics) and machine learning. The project will: Profile lung and gut microbiota changes post-infection in African cohorts. Identify biomarkers linking respiratory pathogens to neuroinflammation and cognitive decline. Build a predictive AI model for neurodegenerative risk stratification. Propose low-cost, culturally adapted preventive strategies for at-risk populations. By integrating wet-lab research, data science, and community health engagement, this work will pioneer a translational, interd
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The Epistemology of Resilience: Integrating Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge for Climate-Adapted African Livestock Systems
African livestock farmers have developed sophisticated knowledge systems for breeding climate-resilient animals over generations, observing behavioural patterns and survival across droughts and heat waves. Meanwhile, molecular scientists measure resilience through laboratory tests of animal genes and stress responses. Climate policymakers use yet another approach, relying on population-scale models and vulnerability indices. Each produces valuable insights, but these knowledge systems rarely communicate with each other. This project asks: what if we stopped trying to translate between these different ways of knowing and instead created frameworks that allow them to coexist as equals? Through intensive fieldwork with Nigerian pastoralists and molecular analysis, this project will develop a poly-epistemic framework that treats indigenous breeding knowledge and Western science as complementary partners rather than competitors. The goal is not just theoretical but a means of creating pract
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The Conflicting Integration of African Businesses in Global Flow
In the global flow of people, technology, and commerce, African businesses face a conflicting position of integration. On one hand, entrepreneurs are leveraging available digital tools to reach a global audience and participate in transnational trade. On the other hand, some countries are banned from using popular international payment platforms, and there are ongoing issues with ineffective shipping systems that connect Africa, and Africa to other parts of the world. This study aims to examine, from the national to the business level, the frameworks, policies, and strategies that governments and entrepreneurs adopt to support small-scale business internationalisation through digital technologies. Using a qualitative method, with a phenomenological approach, I will study the fashion industries in Nigeria and Ghana. This research will explore how businesses from these two countries are accessing global markets through digital technologies. The study will probe questions about state-leve
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Cardiometabolic Disease (CMD) in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tackling Mechanisms, Care Models and Policy Gaps
Non-communicable diseases, particularly cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, are becoming increasingly prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and have emerged as one of the region’s main causes of mortality. Despite this growing burden, SSA is characterised by a severe dearth of well researched context-specific mechanistic data, underdeveloped care provision infrastructure, and highly fragmented health policies. The current understanding of CMDs employed within the population in SSA, including pathophysiology, risk stratification, and treatment algorithms, is vastly derived from populations of European ancestry, limiting both the accuracy of risk prediction and the appropriateness of applied clinical interventions for SSA populations who exhibit distinct biological and phenotypic profiles. This proposal seeks to build directly on recently published foundational arguments from the Africa-Europe Cluster of Research Excellence collaborative and the A
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Bad Mothers: Gender and Modernism in 20th-Century Indian Literature
My project considers the experimental, partial, and sidelong representation of mothers in 20th-century Indian women’s literature. Hemmed in by idealized images of motherhood in the culture at large, these writers used alternative representations of mothers – what I call “bad” mothers – as a way of rethinking the family in relation to Indian modernity. I argue that the literature of maternal deviance advances new representational practices that use the malleability of language and innovations in form to imagine motherhood anew. They tell us something about what a feminist modernity might look like in the absence of a widely accepted language of feminism, and they convey the centrality of the family to modernity, beyond the politics of feminist empowerment. In this way they demonstrate the creative process of imagining modernity, a term which has often been written off as imitative, elite, male, and Brahminical. I argue that these authors use bad mothers to imagine a vernacular, postcolo
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“Killing Improves Ranking”: Gang Life of Secret Cult Artisans in Lagos, Nigeria
This project investigates what motivates artisans (motor park touts, scavengers, street hawkers) working in the informal economy of Lagos state, Nigeria to join secret cults gangs. It unpacks how the gang life of artisanal cult members helps to understand the character of youth deviance and criminality in contemporary Africa. While cult gangs were formed and based in tertiary institutions, they have now expanded into artisanal street-based youth groups with demonstrable lethality that accounted for 1,286 deaths between 2020 and 2025. Of these, the South-South geopolitical zone recorded 750 deaths, followed by 491 fatalities in the South-West , with Lagos (dominated by rival cult gangs such as Aiye (Neo Black Movement), Eiye (Airlords), and Buccaneer) recording the second-highest number of fatalities in the country. Using an exploratory design, the study relies on in-depth interviews with artisanal street secret cult gang members, as well as confessional statements from arrested members
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Pluriversal AI Futures: Computational Empowerment for Sustainable Alternatives
How can we imagine and design computational practices for sustainable pluriversal AI futures that enable diversity of voices, knowledges and epistemologies? Contemporary polycrises urgently call for technological alternatives to drive sustainable transitions that engage diverse local communities and knowledge systems. While discourses in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) call for responsible, ethical AI, these agendas are driven by Western values and hegemonic frameworks that do not align with marginal voices, lifeworlds and Global South epistemologies. The project develops a theoretical framework for Pluriversal AI Futures based in comparative research across local sites and communities in Namibia, South Africa and Denmark. Building on transdisciplinary approaches across anthropology and technology research, the project advances pluriversality in computational practices towards equitable and sustainable AI futures based on situated everyday practices in pluralistic society.
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“So, Where Did the Bantu Go?” A history of interdisciplinarity in African Studies, 1850-2025
For more than a century and a half, the concept of "Bantu" — coined by Wilhelm Bleek to designate a family of languages across sub-Saharan Africa — has become one of the most collectively sustained narratives in African Studies. Historical linguistics, archaeology, and population genetics have successively constructed, borrowed from, and reinforced one another around this concept, in an interdisciplinary dialogue that Jan Vansina described as early as 1978 as a "dialogue of the deaf." This project proposes an intellectual history of that circularity. The aim is not to settle the empirical question of Bantu origins, but to understand how disciplines have produced an illusion of convergence by sharing a common formal model — the genealogical tree — without ever examining its foundations. The project traces this trajectory in four stages: the philological origins of the concept, its appropriation by programmed archaeology, its extension into contemporary genomics, and its political uses,
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Cardiometabolic Disease (CMD) in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tackling Mechanisms, Care Models and Policy Gaps
Non-communicable diseases, particularly cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, are becoming increasingly prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and have emerged as one of the region’s main causes of mortality. Despite this growing burden, SSA is characterised by a severe dearth of well researched context-specific mechanistic data, underdeveloped care provision infrastructure, and highly fragmented health policies. The current understanding of CMDs employed within the population in SSA, including pathophysiology, risk stratification, and treatment algorithms, is vastly derived from populations of European ancestry, limiting both the accuracy of risk prediction and the appropriateness of applied clinical interventions for SSA populations who exhibit distinct biological and phenotypic profiles. This proposal seeks to build directly on recently published foundational arguments from the Africa-Europe Cluster of Research Excellence collaborative and the A
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Cardiometabolic Disease (CMD) in Sub-Saharan Africa: Tackling Mechanisms, Care Models and Policy Gaps
Non-communicable diseases, particularly cardiometabolic diseases (CMDs) such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, are becoming increasingly prevalent in Sub Saharan Africa (SSA) and have emerged as one of the region’s main causes of mortality. Despite this growing burden, SSA is characterised by a severe dearth of well researched context-specific mechanistic data, underdeveloped care provision infrastructure, and highly fragmented health policies. The current understanding of CMDs employed within the population in SSA, including pathophysiology, risk stratification, and treatment algorithms, is vastly derived from populations of European ancestry, limiting both the accuracy of risk prediction and the appropriateness of applied clinical interventions for SSA populations who exhibit distinct biological and phenotypic profiles. This proposal seeks to build directly on recently published foundational arguments from the Africa-Europe Cluster of Research Excellence collaborative and the A
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Investigating Deuteration as a Strategy to Valorise African-Derived Natural Products and Medicinal Compounds
This project explores how deuteration - replacing certain hydrogen atoms in molecules with atoms of its heavier isotope, deuterium, can make natural medicines/products from Africa more stable and effective. Deuteration strengthens chemical bonds, helping drugs resist breakdown in the body without changing how they work. Although the method is widely used in modern pharmaceuticals and functional materials, it has not yet been applied to African traditional medicines or natural products, many of which degrade quickly during storage or use. Indeed, deuteration has rarely been used for drug discovery or development in Africa, including South Africa, despite its benefits. During my STIAS fellowship, i will identify unstable African compounds that could benefit from deuteration, design possible chemical modifications involving the incorporation of deuterium, and review deuteration-related research across Africa to better understand advances made with and barriers to using this chemistry more
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Canned Empire: Corned Beef, Infrastructure, and Everyday Life in Southern Africa and Polynesia
This project examines contemporary food systems under conditions of global transformation, focusing on the increasing reliance on imported processed foods in regions shaped by colonial histories and structural dependency. It conceptualizes food systems as infrastructures, understood not only as material networks of production and distribution, but also as social and everyday practices through which food becomes available and meaningful. The project takes canned corned beef as a strategic analytical entry point. Although seemingly mundane, this commodity embodies the historical entanglements of empire, industrial food production, and global trade, and today circulates widely in geographically remote and economically marginalized regions, where it plays complex and often ambivalent roles in everyday life. This study draws on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among San communities in the Kalahari, alongside field research in South Africa as a site of production, and incorporates historical
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Essays on Art, Politics and Literature in South and southern Africa
My research proposal is centred around the completion of a book project. The envisaged book, which could be thought of as a volume of essays, is intended to unfold in four parts. Each of the parts relates to an area of intellectual work that I have researched and published in but have never compiled into a book. Together the four parts are intended to work across domains of intersection I would characterise as the present and futures of universities, art and politics, literature and climate change, and literary memoir. Below I offer a more extended description of the intended composition of the four parts, and I conclude by delineating the intended framing of the book and the kind of intervention it hopes to make.
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Pambazuka: Dawn of the Kenyan State
‘Pambazuka: Dawn of the Kenyan State’ is a graphic novel that tells the story of a newly independent African nation and its relationship with the rest of the continent. It is a dramatized account based on actual people, historical events and locations. Most of the story is based in the virulent 1960s when countries that had just gained self-determination struggled with various challenges; from divergent political ideologies to dashing the hopes of citizens who expected a better life after the departure of colonial powers. The book also examines the fast changing society and culture that occurred at the time by embedding a fictional family as a backdrop to the unfolding events. It lays a rigid backgrounder for the reader, as well, by going back in time to the formation of the ancient African continent, early movement of human populations, the colonial period and eventual rise of nationalism. Content layout is made up of comic panels, full-page illustrations, speech balloons, text side b
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A Spatially Functional Atlas of the Healing Intestinal Barrier: Implications for Inflammatory Bowel Diseases
Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), encompassing Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, represents a global health challenge with no known cure. Current therapeutic paradigms focus primarily on suppressing inflammation, yet over 40% of patients fail to achieve clinical remission. This project proposes a shift toward mucosal healing, the active process of tissue regeneration, as a superior therapeutic target. By utilizing cutting-edge spatial biology technologies and computational pipelines, combined with human material and animal models, we aim to generate a high-resolution "Spatially Functional Atlas" of the healing intestine. Using non-commercially available technologies, this work will map host-microbiota interactions in situ, providing a blueprint for the next generation of non-immunosuppressive IBD treatments.
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Performance across species: from multimodal spider courtship to African drumming and dance
Spiders perform some of the most elaborate songs and dances in the animal kingdom, integrating movement, ornamentation, and vibratory song into coordinated displays. Historically, studies of their complexity were typically reduced to isolated, unchanging traits—ornaments, vibratory components, or solitary movements—rather than understood as the coordinated execution of behavior through time. How signals are sequenced, timed, and varied - how they are performed - is a central dimension of animal communication has remained conceptually underdeveloped. My research on multimodal courtship signaling in Schizocosa wolf spiders has repeatedly revealed that mating success depends not simply on what signals are produced, but on how they are executed: their timing, coordination, and dynamic structure. These findings point to a missing analytical framework. To address this, I propose to engage a body of scholarship that has long treated performance as its central object of study: specific African
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An ecocentric view of epidemics and pandemics: time for a fundamental shift in preparedness research?
The recent history of infectious diseases has shown that the number of epidemics and pandemics resulting from spillovers of animal viruses to humans is increasing. There is consensus that some of this increase is a direct result of human actions, although the drivers for such epidemics are complex, ranging from factors that increase the contact between humans and animals, (such as deforestation, climate-driven changes in ecosystems, and change in land use by development of high density farming), the rate of dispersal once humans become infected (for instance global travel and trade, migration), and the increased susceptibility of some part of the population (poverty, co-infections, ageing among others). This also implies that our current approach to epidemic research falls short, as it rarely includes the ecological perspective, thereby not looking at root causes of prevention and early detection. With colleagues from STIAS and beyond, I want to analyse which concepts from biomedical s
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Reimagining Chemistry
Chemistry has reshaped almost every system that sustains—or threatens—life on Earth. The Janus face of chemistry is e.g., exemplified in its contribution and effect on food and population, energy and climate, and air and the environment. How chemistry could (and should) be reimagined to better serve humankind? How could chemistry be self-restrained to reduce complexity and potential harm to the environment and human health and could this restriction release creativity and innovation in the generation of new materials and chemicals of “use to humankind“, to quote Claude Louis Berthollet.
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God’s Chosen? Dealing with Deadly Distortions
The notion of being God’s chosen people is as dangerous an idea as any other in human history. It provides theological legitimation for ideologies such as Eurocentrism, white supremacy, British imperialism, Nazi supremacy, apartheid racism, the MAGA-ideology, and Zionism in multiple forms. Nevertheless, the intention of the term is arguably inclusive and affirming: It affirms the identity of those who are excluded and rejected, oppressed and marginalised, including migrants, refugees and the victims of xenophobia. Its focus is on the particular for the sake of the universal. This yields the intriguing question: where and how does a logic of inclusivity become as exclusivist as the exclusivism that it seeks to counter? This is primarily a philosophical question but one that is open to debate in historical studies, politics, economics, sociology, religion and theology alike. This project entails a case study of ideological distortion as part of a history of dangerous ideas. Its focus wil
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A Practice to Hold the Salt Wind
A Practice to Hold the Salt Wind is a work of literary oral history, attending to how people remember themselves free inside conditions that refuse their freedom: across the diaspora, across the Global South, across the present-tense foreclosures of migration and return. Built from fifteen years of oral history interviews, quotidian encounters, and the author's own inquiry in the wake of displacement, the book is structured as a chorus of encounters: returns to specific moments held with specific people, rendered through ethnopoetic transcription, essayistic prose, image, and assemblage. The book asks what archives a life whose agency has been foreclosed. It proposes that our horizons, our dreams, our acts of reaching are themselves a form of being. The practices we improvise to keep those horizons alive, in ritual, song, in a suitcase under a grandmother's bed, in the body that carries ancestry across generations, are the counter-ontology of the global majority. Grounded in Caribbean
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Beyond Aid: African Science and the Emergence of Multipolar Knowledge Regimes
The global system of scientific knowledge production is undergoing a structural transformation. For decades, African research systems have operated within what can be described as aid-dependent science systems, shaped by Western funding priorities, institutional partnerships, and epistemic hierarchies. Recent large-scale reductions in foreign aid—particularly following the dismantling of USAID and parallel cuts by major OECD donors—signal not merely a contraction of resources, but a potential transition toward a post-aid configuration of global science. This project advances the concept of multipolar knowledge regimes to analyse how African science is being reconfigured under conditions of shifting geopolitical power. It asks whether current developments represent a temporary disruption or a deeper transformation in the organisation of global knowledge production. Rather than treating Africa as a passive recipient of external influence, the study positions African research systems as a
