Research Advisory Board
	Criteria for evaluating research proposals
	Completed projects
	Current projects
	Projects under development

CURRENT PROJECTS

A Critical Assessment of New Developments in Complexity Theory
Increased awareness (mainly as result of the impact of technology) of the complexity of the physical, biological and social world has stimulated new developments in Complexity Theory. The project will explore the new ways to understand and model complex systems in four specific areas: Philosophy; Mathematics, Physics and Computational Sciences; Biological Sciences; and Organisational and Social Sciences.

Project Leaders: Paul Cilliers and Jannie Hofmeyr (SU)
Fellows: Harry Kunneman (UvH, Utrecht), Reinette Biggs (Stockholm), Mario Giampietro (Barcelona), Marcello Barbieri (Ferrara), Joachim De Beule (Free U, Brussels)
Publications: Explorations in Complexity Thinking - Kurt A Richardson and Paul Cilliers (editors) (2007) Pre-Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Complexity and Philosophy, ISCE Publishing, Mansfield MA.
Complexity, Difference and Identity — an ethical perspective – Paul Cilliers and Rika Preiser (editors) (2010) Springer Verlag (Heidelberg, New York, London) 300 pp

The Role of Knowledge Experts
The advent of the knowledge society has placed the spotlight on the role of experts as gatekeepers and as brokers of knowledge. This is a problem that concerns developed and developing countries alike. In developing countries the problem is exacerbated by the imbalances in the production and access to knowledge, increasing the possibility of a new form of ‘knowledge colonialisation’ and dependency.

Project Leader: Peter Weingart (Bielefeld)
SU Researcher: Johann Mouton

Ecoinformatics
The discipline of Bioinformatics has emerged in the field of molecular and cell biology to deal with the huge amounts of information generated first by genomic and more recently by transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic studies. A parallel field labelled Ecoinformatics is emerging to encompass the interpretation of data relevant to ecological and broader environmental processes. According to a Wikipedia entry, Ecoinformatics is aimed at facilitating environmental research and management by developing ways to access and integrate databases and develop new algorithms to test ecological hypotheses. Hence it encompasses not only the management and dissemination of information, but also ecological modelling and statistical assessment.

In South Africa, a pioneering thrust in Ecoinformatics has been made by a collaboration between the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Kruger Park’s Scientific Services division, but this remains unsupported by any South African academic structure. The need in South Africa for such support is especially urgent following the establishment of the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) by the Department of Science and Technology, aimed at establishing the consequences of climate shifts and land use change for ecosystem services, biodiversity and human livelihoods.

The aim of the project is to develop a structured approach towards addressing the challenges and opportunities presented with special relevance to African conditions.

Project Leader: Wayne Getz (Berkeley)
Fellows: Norman Owen-Smith (Witwatersrand), Lev Ginzburg (SUNY Stony Brook), Eloy Revilla (CSIC, Sevilla), David Saltz (Ben Gurion)

Faith and Fabric (The status of ‘secular modernity’ in an African context)
In 2005/2006 the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin hosted an inter-disciplinary research project on “secular modernity” in which world-renowned Fellows like Hans Joas (German sociologist, director of the Max Weber Center in Erfurt, professor of the University of Chicago), who led the project, Charles Taylor (Canadian philosopher) and Jose Casanova (sociologist of religion from New York), amongst others, studied the nature of secularisation and the presence and role or religion in different so-called “modern” societies. Among the first products of this year was the major award-winning work by Taylor, A secular age (Harvard University Press, 2007). Broadly speaking, and by way of generalization, one may say that they all reject – for different reasons, from different academic disciplines and providing different scholarly accounts – the so-called “mainline secularization theory,” that has been taken for granted for so long by many theorists and ordinary people in specific societies – that “modernity brings about secularity. The STIAS project revisits these questions in an African context.

Project Leader: Dirkie Smit (SU)
Fellows: Hans Joas (U Erfurt), Wolfgang Huber (Humboldt U, Berlin)
SU Researchers: Bernard Lategan

Rethinking Capitalist Crisis: A Neo-Polanyian Perspective
This project seeks to overcome the (economistic, functionalist) limitations of received understandings of crisis, by drawing on the thought of Karl Polanyi, especially his 1944 work, The Great Transformation. My aim is to reconstruct Polanyi’s key ideas (fictitious commodification, the double movement) in a form suitable to clarifying the crisis tendencies of the 21st century. The work is expected to eventuate in a book.

Fellow: Nancy Fraser (The New School for Social Research, NY)

What is a Rational Response to Catastrophic Risk?
When it comes to low probability-high impact (even catastrophic) risk, the judgment of ordinary people, it seems, is not to be trusted. Emotions (like fear) are said to override our capacity for rational response. As one commentator puts it, “we have a confounding habit of worrying about mere possibilities while ignoring probabilities, building barricades against perceived dangers while leaving ourselves exposed to real ones.” But what in fact is a ‘rational’ response? How do we know which risks are “real”?

The conventional advice is to turn to experts, i.e., to those skilled in the rules of rational (cost-benefit) analysis. The trouble with this advice is that when it comes to assessing the risk of catastrophic events, the rules conventionally employed fail most common sense criteria for rationality. It is argued that sometimes the heuristics employed by non-experts – the very heuristics held responsible for misguiding ordinary judgment – can outperform (in the sense of providing more reliable guides) the analyses that are taken as providing our gold standard of rationality.

The “heuristic of fear” that Hans Jonas proposed as a guide for “an ethics of responsibility for distant contingencies” may well be a case in point. According to Jonas, the heuristic of fear serves to teach us what it is we truly cherish, and hence can inform us as to what we must do. I will argue – following Jonas – that, when faced with threats of distant catastrophe, fear may be not only appropriate, but also a legitimate and perhaps necessary ingredient of a truly rational response.

Fellow: Evelyn Fox Keller (MIT)

Population, Land, Food: Malthus and Africa
A study of how Malthus relates to understanding, and resolving, the food-land-population predicaments of sub-Saharan Africa. After "green revolutions", most of Asia enjoys rapid growth and stabilizing population. Yet growth in sub-Saharan Africa is slow and patchy, while projected 2050 population is ten times 1950 levels (already it has risen sixfold). Food production - and farm and other employment - lag far behind, due to increasingly scarce land, soil nutrients and water, alongside sluggish farm technology. Might Malthus help? Not as a preacher of doom, but that is a myth. He became a flexible empiricist, exploring routes to progress: higher food output, lower mortality, voluntary fertility decline. He integrated the analysis of changing population, land and food. Today, these topics are fragmented within, and among, disciplines (economics, demography, agriculture, nutrition, ecology). Specialization has brought advances - for example, we now see the impact of changing age-structures, which Malthus missed. Buiding on these advances, this study will re-integrate these topics and disciplines, and thereby separate true and false grounds for fear, hope and policy in Africa.

Fellow: Michael Lipton (U. Sussex; recipient of the 2012 Leontief Prize for "Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought")

Lawmaking for Global Crisis Situations
More likely than not, the world will be facing a series of serious crises, connected to climate change, environmental disasters, natural catastrophes, shortage of all kinds of raw materials and sources of mineral energy, as well as new financial crises.To the extent they are man-made, they probably have common denominators, most importantly a short term view of those in responsible positions and conflicts of interest of the same.

If we cannot stem the tide, the consequences will be of an unprecented magnitude in terms of personal suffering and financial harm for present and future generations. The project aims to explore whether legal means can be used to avoid crises and, to the extent this would not be the case, how to cope with them. Answering the latter question requires a balancing of the very different interests of all concerned (such as “developed” and “less developed” countries as well as present and future generations). The angle will mainly be intra-disciplinary (international, national and human rights law); besides we have to borrow from the insights from countries from all over the globe.

Project Leaders: Jaap Spier (Advocate-General in the Supreme Court of the Netherlands & Maastricht U), Gerhard Lubbe (SU)
Fellows: Ulrich Magnus (Hamburg), Julia Xue (Ocean University of China)
SU Researchers: Oliver Ruppel, Gerhard Kemp

Literacy Practices of Multilingual Students
Traditionally, teachers of reading and writing have assumed texts as monolingual and monomodal. This dominant orientation to textuality, variously referred to as alphabetic literacy or autonomous literacy, has resulted in the multilingual literacy practices of students being perceived as deficient. Schooling has engaged in suppressing the multilingual and multimodal literacy practices and imposing alphabetic literacy on multilingual students. However, in the context of globalization, multiculturalism, and digital communication, everyone is becoming acquainted with multimodal and multilingual literacies. There is now an effort to understand such literacy practices and inculcate such skills among all students.

This project involves observing the literacy practices of students in township schools in Cape Town in July-August 2011. By adopting an ethnographic orientation, the researcher will attempt to study literacy practices from students' own perspectives. The researcher will also closely study the essays written in English by township students to explain how students merge their local languages, values, and discourses in their writing. This study will lead to theorizing multilingual literacies in more complex terms and making suitable policy recommendations for schools.

Fellow: Suresh Canagarajah (Penn State U)

Linear vs. Polarizing Trends in World Social Processes
Over the past two centuries, the dominant view in social science has been that the modern world shows a pattern of linear development in which all positive trends go upward in more or less linear fashion (albeit perhaps at an uncertain speed), and that therefore over time discrepancies between the leaders and the laggards are overcome, toward a relatively homogenized world. This view was shared by classical and neoclassical economics, by what was called Whig historiography, and by most of traditional sociology and anthropology. Classical or orthodox Marxism, while very opposed to a liberal Weltanschauung, shared, by and large, the belief in the inevitability of progress and the linear upward pattern of social processes.

In the post 1945 period, a number of analysts began to contest this linear model. Rather than viewing the modern world as a process of homogeneization and therefore of overcoming gaps, many social scientists began to argue that the modern world was one of heterogeneization and polarization, indeed a pattern of escalating polarization, which was itself the outcome of the way in which the modern world was structured.

An intellectual collaboration of ten research working groups has been evaluating the empirical evidence in this fundamental debate. The research has been large in scale and long in duration. The object of analysis has been the existing world system as a whole over the whole of its effective existence of the past 500 years and will be covered in a semi-final draft of this collective international research project of social scientists.

Fellow: Immanuel Wallerstein (Yale)

Informational Development and Human Development: South Africa in a Global Perspective
In a recent comparative research project the interaction between informational development and human development has been examined in various contexts, including Finland, Silicon Valley, Chile and Taiwan. The project aims at extending the analysis to South Africa. The study has a major policy component, as its final aim is to propose ways to link the economic, technological, and human dynamics of development in a new model of growth and well being.

Fellow: Manuel Castells (U Southern California)

“Many Voices One Song.” Health-promoting Schools: Evidence, Strategies, Challenges and Prospects
Globally, a moral imperative exists to ensure that all children are provided with the resources and environment necessary to enable them to reach their individual potential, and the call for investment to improve the health of children is almost universal. In parallel technological approaches are being sought to simplify prevention, diagnosis and management of disease. However, national resources for health are sparse and massive demands already exist, hence much must be achieved through health promotion at a community level, and to be viable any novel technologies must be simple and/or cost effective. Health promoting schools (HPS) have proven potential for positively impacting the determinants of health, and technologies employing light now show promise in a range of relevant health care applications.

The World Health Organization defines a health promoting school as one that “uses a whole-school approach to enhance the health and educational outcomes of children through teaching and learning experiences initiated in the schools.” The knowledge and practices acquired provide individuals and communities with greater control over determinants of health. A colloquium recently brought together experts in HPS at STIAS to review the lessons learned to date and define the key elements and optimum processes for establishing and sustaining effective HP schools. Now, a consensus statement to guide further expansion of HPS programs particularly in sub-Saharan Africa is in preparation; a monograph of the papers presented is to be published; research papers on program evaluation are being written; and a collaborative grant proposal prepared.

Photonic devices (those using light energy) can monitor a range of physiologic parameters. Light emitting diodes are an inexpensive source of non toxic energy, and ongoing advances in photonics hardware and software make non invasive real time measurement and imaging possible. Novel applications related to renal and bladder function have been developed (worldwide the morbidity and mortality related to such disease is considerable), and current research is aimed at developing the function and scope of miniature devices that will improve quality of life for children, patients with spinal cord injury, and pregnant women.

Fellow: Andrew Macnab (British Columbia), Arabat Kasangaki (Makerere U)

Mobile filmmaking
This project entails further refining and developing the technological apparatus necessary for the creation of broad quality digital film media from a mobile source taking into cognizance the specific advantages that such a breakthrough would have for millions of previously disadvantaged South African citizens whose access to the "mainframe" of the digital grid is extremely limited. South Africa is the country in Africa with the most developed mobile phone penetration and accordingly the potential for mobile phone generated narratives is immense. Key phrases such as "local memory", "indigenous knowledge" and "tactical media" will inform practice. The end result, a document derived entirely from local experience in the Cloetesville region; a film created by the marginalized utilizing state of the art mobile technology to centralize them in their own narrative.

Fellow: Aryan Kaganov (STIAS artist in residence)

The Karretjie People of the Karoo
This play centres on the harsh and challenging world of the itinerant group of sheep shearers in the Karoo who have now virtually disappeared. (This is the first of Fugard's plays with the original text written in Afrikaans.)

Fellow: Athol Fugard (South African Playwright)

Institutional Ecology, Sustainable Use and Community Based Natural Resource Management
Ecosystem services and wild resources are worth more than global GDP. Unlike capital and human resources, humankind has only evolved crude institutions for wild resources. These are failing to conserve natural environments, or to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor that coexist with nature. Managing wild resources often requires collective action. Thus, the global narrative now accepts the rights and abilities of local people to manage wild resources, but practice has been disappointing. The center has regularly devolved too little power or benefit. When it has done so, emerging local institutions are characterized by elite capture, low levels of participation and inequitable benefit sharing.

Southern African pioneered new approaches to the governance of wild resources, initially on private land and through community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) programmes. This project, at the interface of global scholarship and oral knowledge within the southern African community-of-practice, aims to improve our understanding of the economics and governance of wild resources, and focuses on the neglected field of micro-governance. New institutions can increase the output of drylands ten-fold, and share it more equitably, so this project has direct application to the lives of millions of people living in Africa’s savannas, and to forest and fisheries conservation in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Fellow: Brian Child (Florida)

The Politics of Judicial Review in South Africa
South Africa’s turn to liberal constitutionalism has attracted wide interest from comparative politics scholars.  To date, however, there has been little serious scholarly work done on the politics of adjudication in South Africa.  This project fills that gap by exploring the political constraints under which the first South African Constitutional Court operated from 1995-2005.  In particular, it investigates how the Court was able to negotiate those constraints while remaining faithful to law.  In so doing, the project draws on a rich tradition of North American political science and legal scholarship and applies this body of knowledge to South Africa for the first time.

Fellow: Theunis Roux (New South Wales)

Inter-contextual hermeneutics: interpreting the bible in its social-historical and contemporary contexts
The contemporary western academic modes of reading the bible which focuses on the history of the text or the text itself, and serve western interests and goals are inadequate for addressing questions and issues from African contexts. African scholars have therefore developed a general interpretation framework - the Contextual Approach - that relates the text to the African context. Within this contextual paradigm and using the newer social-historical approach in biblical interpretation, this project aims to develop a methodology - Inter-Contextual Hermeneutics - for reading the bible in its social-historical context and contemporary contexts using the mediation of African cultural resources. In this way, the reading will be informed by both contexts and the biblical message will be enabled to come alive in the contemporary context.

Fellow: Justin Ukpong (Abuja) (Deceased)

Regime shifts in social-ecological systems: impacts on ecosystem services and implications for poverty alleviation
Regime shifts refer to large, persistent changes in the structure and function of complex systems such as intertwined social-ecological systems (SES). Regime shifts in SES often have large impacts on ecosystem services (e.g., freshwater, food production, climate regulation) with considerable consequences for human livelihoods, health and security. There is evidence that the likelihood of regime shifts is increasing at local to global scales due to extensive anthropogenic pressures on the environment, and that it threatens the potential for long-term development and poverty eradication, especially in developing regions such as Africa.

This research aims to synthesize and compare different regime shifts that have been documented in SES, including the drivers of these shifts, impacts on ecosystem services and human well-being, and implications for poverty alleviation through the development of a Regime Shifts Database (www.regimeshifts.org). This research aims to provide insights into how SES can be practically managed to build resilience in terms of i) avoiding undesirable regime shifts, ii) adapting to regime shifts that cannot be avoided, and iii) facilitating desirable social-ecological regime shifts or transformations.

Fellows: Reinette (Oonsie) Biggs (Stockholm), Thomas Elmqvist (Stockholm), Garry Peterson (Stockholm)

Xenophobia, Migrancy and Multiculturalism
Different causes and expressions of xenophobia are analyzed by comparing three countries: South Africa, Germany and Canada. On a spectrum of rejection of migrants, South Africa is situated at one extreme, with Germany in the middle, and Canada at the other extreme. In each country, different rationalizations are used for 'othering' and different policies have been adopted for dealing with legal and illegal migrants. This project aims at a deeper understanding by a) probing xenophobia in the context of the general literature on ethnicity, nationalism and racism, b) contributing some neglected ethnographic data in each context and c) drawing lessons about appropriate interventions and policies in multi-ethnic societies.

Examples for puzzling question are, for South Africa: why would the victims of Apartheid exclusion turn violently against fellow Africans and what does this imply for political education in the post-apartheid era? For Germany: why is assimilation now advocated and multiculturalism been declared a failure when it has hardly been implemented in the first place? For Canada: can the country's successful multiculturalism be exported and under what conditions can a modern welfare state be sustained and benefit from relatively high immigration rates?

Fellows: Heribert Adam (Simon Fraser), Kogila Moodley (British Columbia)

The Pitfalls of Reductionism in Vaccine Research
Reductionism has been the predominant research strategy of molecular and structural biology in the 20th century. According to Francis Crick (1966):«The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is to explain all of biology in terms of physics and chemistry». It is now realized that a complex biological system like the immune system possesses many emergent properties that are not present in the individual components of the system. Vaccination is firmly anchored in the biological realm and cannot be reduced to the level of chemistry. Immunological reductionism analyzes the different components of the immune system separately (individual binding sites, T cell help, adjuvants, antibody affinity maturation, etc) and fails to explain how these constituents produce a synergy that leads to protective immunity. The use of monoclonal antibodies for dissecting neutralizing immune responses and designing appropriate vaccines has been particularly counterproductive. Future vaccine development will benefit if the current reductionist mindset is replaced by a more empirical and systems approach emphasizing clinical vaccine trials as the only effective strategy able to lead to vaccine discovery.

Fellow: Marc Van Regenmortel (CNRS, Strasbourg)

The scientific method in biology and biomedicine
Philosophers tend to explain the success of the scientific enterprise in terms of a so-called “scientific method” believed to be typical of physics and chemistry. In the second half of the twentieth century, it has become widely accepted that biology, i.e. the science of living organisms, is characterized by an inherent complexity that requires the use of different methods of analysis and explanation from those applicable in physics and chemistry.

Entities like genes and species, or processes like emergence and evolution cannot be adequately described in terms of simple physico-chemical principles and phenomena. There are no scientific laws in biology but only generalizations corresponding to heuristic devices useful to predict and control biological phenomena. This project will comprise the writing of a book that will discuss the following topics: 1) scientific facts, theories and laws, 2) causality, explanation and understanding in biology, 3) philosophical analyses of the scientific method, 4) reductionism and emergence, 5) design, teleology, natural selection and evolution, 6) structure-function relationships in biology, 7) complexity and systems biology, 8) rational design versus empirical hypothesis testing in biomedicine, 9)scientific discoveries by serendipity, 10) science, pseudoscience and anti-science, 11) HIV-AIDS denialism, 12) public distrust of vaccines and of genetically modified foods.

Fellow: Marc Van Regenmortel (CNRS, Strasbourg)

Basic questions of ethics
Today ethics have to be formulated for pluralistic societies that encompass a variety of religions and worldviews including the "secular option". Whereas former secularization theories included the assumption that in modern societies only secular forms of ethics are of general importance, according to a pluralistic theory of society religious ethics have to be included as contributors to the ethical debate in society. At the same time there is a growing interest in practical challenges for ethical reflection - may these challenges originate in the progress of life sciences, in the process of economic globalization or in other developments. It is therefore time to bridge anew the gap between metaethics and applied ethics. For that purpose the human life cycle shall be used as starting point for the selection of ethical issues that will be discussed. The plan for this book is understood as a contribution to the STIAS-project on "Faith and Fabric".

Fellow: Wolfgang Huber (Humboldt U, Berlin)

Approaching Human-Environment System (HES) based transdisciplinary processes: The case of Global Transdisciplinary Processes for Sustainable Phosphorus Management
Humankind is facing a new age, i.e. the anthropocene, with new problems. Thus, also science is facing new intellectual and methodological challenges. The term anthropocene has been coined by Paul Crutzen and means that human activities have become a geological factor. Actually, the impacts of human action are affecting many earth system processes such as climate, biodiversity, surface structures, the biochemical matrix and biogeochemical cycles. This asks for proper knowledge for reflecting, conceptualizing, modeling and managing inextricably coupled HES. Transdisciplinarity has become a third method of doing science and is considered as a means to help in this effort. In the recent book (“Environmental Literacy in Science and Society: From Knowledge to Decisions”, Roland Scholz) it is pointed out that transdisciplinary processes may have the potential to better understand and to design resilient human environment systems than other processes which have been used so far. The case of global sustainable phosphorus management and the Global TraPs project (Global Transdisciplinary Processes for Sustainable Phosphorus management) in which Stellenbosch University, South African industry and NGOs are involved may serve as a concrete case for this research challenge.

Fellow: Roland Scholz (ETH, Zürich)

Health care interactions in multicultural societies
Communication has been identified as the single biggest barrier to health care and the provision of culturally and linguistically appropriate services is a top priority, particularly in light of the illness burden imposed by diseases such as HIV/AIDS. A body of research has emerged in Sweden and South Africa on communication strategies in medical interaction, with a special focus on intercultural and activity-dependent aspects in communicatively challenged interactions. This collaborative project will combine the data and enable new insights into intercultural communicative processes and their application to policy and practice as well as the training of clinicians.

Fellows: Claire Penn (Witwatersrand), Elisabeth Ahlsen and Jens Allwood (Göteborg)

Interpreting the life of Chief Albert Luthuli
This is a study of the legacies and meanings of Chief Luthuli’s life in history and today. It will unpack the character of his Christianity, what Luthuli understands by ‘God’s will, holy and perfect’ and notions like ‘divine discontent’ and the ‘gospel of service. It also examines the relationship between rationality, passion and sacrifice in Luthuli’s life, comparing this with that of Mahatma Gandhi. The range of identities that comprise Luthuli’s life and how these interface will be scrutinized. Particular attention will be devoted to the principle of non-violence and Luthuli as a gendered subject.

Fellow: Raymond Suttner (Rhodes, UNISA)

The Boxing Economy of the Eastern Cape
What is the link between the national formal economy on the one hand, and on the other, local community based economic cultures, which may have been largely self-sustaining but interminably precarious? What goes with the working title of “the boxing economy of the Eastern Cape” seems one such local economy. The boxing culture of East London/Mdantsane has been phenomenally successful. For over three decades, and nicknamed “The Boxing Mecca” of South Africa, it has produced no less than 20 world champions and more than 50 national champions.

This study is a reflective and speculative approach to this Eastern Cape boxing phenomenon. It links the narratives of three legendary boxers from their respective generations; traces continuities and discontinuities in a boxing culture that reveals enormous potential as an industry, with a pipe line of new boxers that shows no sign of drying up; asks questions about possibilities for local social upliftment through a home-grown entertainment industry. What does it tell us about the society that has produced it? Where does the macro economy of big industries and national infrastructure come together with such a local economy for mutual sustenance and at what points of convergence? The project is in the writing stage.

Fellow: Njabulo Ndebele (Cape Town)

Institutional Innovations and Investments: Creating an Enabling Environment for Emerging Agro-Enterprises in Africa
Agro-enterprises make important contributions to employment and income generation in developing countries, occupying a strategic position in manufacturing that comprise an essential supply-source of food and fiber production and represent an important demand-driver for agricultural products. The economic performance of agro-enterprises in no small measure depends on their ability to attract capital and new technologies.  Although it is assumed that the performance of agro-enterprises influences economic development goals, the interrelationships among firm strategy, industry performance, and macro-economic development outcomes are currently a source of great debate.  The distributional impacts of capital flows and technology transfers on pro-poor outcomes in developing countries are not widely understood.  This project will evaluate alternative strategies and institutions in economic development to examine the impacts of financial markets and the transfer of technology to agro-enterprises on food security, poverty, and economic growth.

Fellow: Ralph Christy (Cornell)

Moments of awakening: Apartheid and the making of a psychologist
“Moments of Awakening,” is the last project that will bring to completion the trilogy of life writing projects initiated in 2005. The completion of the first two projects in the series in 2011 has opened up an opportunity for the completion of the last project in the trilogy. Conceived as what is sometimes termed intellectual autobiography, the book covers the story of the life and work of a black clinical psychologist in the dark and sombre days of Apartheid.

Fellow: N Chabani Manganyi (Pretoria)

The role of inhibitory and disinhibitory processes in the brain in the formation of esthetic judgement
Scholars in the humanities continue to resist the possible applications of the cognitive neurosciences to the understanding of cultural phenomena.  No rigorous effort has been made to bring recent developments in the study of the neural substrate of the relationship between emotional and motor responses to the understanding of the visual arts. Recent work on the phenomenon of embodied simulation supplements older theories of empathy and felt bodily emulation of what is seen (or even implied) in a visual work of art. The further question of the cortical monitoring of autonomic responses to visual phenomena has begun to receive attention from neuroscientists, but remains neglected by students of visual images. At STIAS I will bring my researches in this area to a close by considering the role of inhibitory and disinhibitory processes in the brain in the formation of esthetic judgement, and lay the groundwork for research into new therapeutic possibilities of motor rehabilitation through looking.

Fellow: David Freedberg (Columbia)

J.M. Coetzee: A Critical Biography
The Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee is currently South Africa’s most resourceful and influential writer. While his roots lie in the Western Cape and Karoo in particular, his intellectual reach embraces Western and Central Europe and much of the United States. His fiction and nonfiction are read and studied throughout the world, from Rio to Beijing, and they are frequently regarded as definitive in current debates in postcolonial and world literature. His influence is felt in the fields of fiction studies, comparative literature, translation, literary theory, aesthetic philosophy and ethics. Following the recent acquisition of 155 boxes of his papers by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, this project is aimed at producing a critical biography. Following in the footsteps of John Kannemeyer’s first biography, a study of the author’s life and work, the project will continue the exploration into the intellectual contexts of Coetzee’s writing, with particular emphasis on the relationship between literature and the social and political history of South Africa.

Fellow: David Attwell (York)

Tightening the Consistency of Quantum Bayesianism
Quantum Bayesianism is an effort to interpret all the probabilities arising in quantum theory (our most accurate physical theory to date, the one ultimately responsible for almost all of modern technology) in terms of the Bayesian conception of probability – that probabilities quantify subjective degrees of belief, rather than objective features of nature. This way of looking at quantum theory greatly relieves many of the conundrums traditionally associated with the theory, and also gives a very natural framework for many of the recent developments in quantum information processing and computing. For this project, we have gathered the leading physicists, philosophers, and mathematicians associated with the movement to fine-tune the view as far as possible.

Project Leader: Christopher A. Fuchs (Perimeter Institute, Canada)

Fellows: D. Marcus Appleby (Perimeter Institute, Canada), Howard Barnum (U. New Mexico), N. David Mermin (Cornell U.), Ruediger Schack (U. of London), and Christopher G. Timpson (Oxford U.)

Beyond Extraversion: Ways towards Intellectual Self-reliance
Most publications by philosophers, scientists and other scholars from Africa and the Third World have so far been intended for an external audience and particularly a Western audience. This intellectual and cultural extraversion is only a consequence of economic extraversion, i.e. the subordination of the whole production process to an external demand. The question therefore is how far the methods and devices proposed by development economists to overcome underdevelopment are applicable to the field of intellectual and scholarly production. This research is an exploration into the nature and challenges of intellectual activity in Africa and the Third World.

Fellow: Paulin J. Hountondji (African Center for Advanced Studies, Porto-Novo, Benin)

Assessing current use and future potential of legumes and symbiotic nitrogen fixation in Africa
The Agricultural Green Revolution of the 20th century, which resulted from plant breeding and increased fertilizer use, led to food sufficiency and security in many parts of the world. Unfortunately, the cost of nitrogenous fertilizers excluded the poorest farmers from reaping the benefits of the Green Revolution. Symbiotic nitrogen fixation (SNF) in legumes provides a free and sustainable alternative to industrial nitrogen fertilizers that enhances primary production on smallholder farms. However, there are potential limitations to the efficiency of SNF that can reduce greatly its contribution to agriculture. This project will assess the current use of legumes in Africa and identify major limitations to SNF on the continent as a prelude to enhancing legumes and SNF for sustainable agriculture here.

Fellow: Michael Udvardi (Noble Foundation, Oklahoma)

Islands of Work at the Rough Edge of the World
and Archiving Culture and Nature: Harlan I. Smith’s Ethnographic Record of the Pacific Slope
Two book-length studies will be completed. The first is a capstone historical-geographical-intellectual study of the workings and impact of the Pacific Coast salmon-canning industry of the late 19th century through to the present: Islands of Work at the Rough Edge of the World. The second book is Archiving Culture and Nature: Harlan I. Smith’s Ethnographic Record of the Pacific Slope, 1897-1937. This interdisciplinary archival and community-based research project delves into the records of Canadian archaeologist and ethnographer Harlan I. Smith for a co-edited, heavily annotated and introduced book-length manuscript of Smith’s letters to and from the Pacific Slope from his time with the famous Jessup North Pacific Expedition, 1897-1910, through to the end of his period as head archaeologist of the Geological Survey of Canada (1911 – 1937), and a selection of his critical essays and ethnographic photographs pertaining to the same region and time, for a scholarly press. The study will contribute to a critical history of both anthropology in Canada and the United States and the interactions between anthropology and Aboriginal communities in a politically critical point in time for Aboriginal peoples in North America.

Fellow: Diane Newell (British Columbia)

Human skin pigmentation:  Further studies of its evolution, biological consequences, and social meaning
Recent research on the topic explored the effects of skin pigmentation on human health and social well-being, and upcoming projects will focus on these aims. The first project is biomedical and will involve study of the relationship between skin pigmentation, sun (UVB) exposure, vitamin D levels, and the progression of infectious diseases. The second project is biosocial and will involve study of the prevalence and motivations for skin bleaching among younger, darkly pigmented South Africans, with the goal of better understanding the motivations of young adults in South Africa for lightening their skin. Both projects will be conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Cape Town and other institutions.

Fellow: Nina Jablonski (Penn State)

Private lands conservation in law and culture
Many ecological conservation goals require the use of legal means to channel land development and otherwise curtail unsound uses of privately owned lands. Significant limits on private land use, however, often clash with cultural ideas about private property and liberty. Are the core elements of private ownership largely static or do they legitimately evolve, and is property chiefly an extension of individual liberty and self-expression or instead a tool society uses to promote the common good? This study, part of a larger comparative effort, will probe South African approaches to private lands conservation in their cultural contexts, looking at specific legal strategies and at how these strategies interact with competing ideas on ownership, individualism, land functioning, and community welfare.

Fellow: Eric Freyfogle (Illinois)

How to survive the post growth century
The 20th century will be seen by historians as the century of growth. World population increased as well as life expectancy and wealth. In the same time resource consumption reached record levels, leaving an overpopulated planet at the edge of a manmade climate change.

But now we are entering the post growth century. The early industrialized nations will soon see their baby boomers reach pension age. Even threshold countries will face an accelerated ageing trend over the next decades. All this will put an end to the classical economic growth scenarios known from the past. Ageing and shrinking societies like Germany or Japan will be the first that have to define a new kind of wellbeing of their citizens in the absence of growth. But a growing number of nations will follow. Despite declining fertility rates, many parts of Asia and most parts of Africa still are on the classical path of population, economic and resource consumption growth. But sooner or later they will need the concepts developed by the frontrunners of demographic change to adapt to the environment of the post growth era.

Long term population projections foresee a world of only 2 to 3 billion people around the year 2300. These people will on average be older, healthier and more peaceful than today, but much better educated and therefore able to live more sustainable and to mitigate the effects of climate change. The crucial question is how mankind can survive the peaks of population growth and resource consumption in the meantime. Therefore ways have to be found, to reduce population growth in the least developed and to prevent that these countries follow the classical development path that is built on massive consumption of fossil fuels.

Fellow: Reiner Klingholz (Berlin)

Ecological and non-ecological speciation mechanisms
During the past decade, there has been a lot of interest among evolutionary biologists in ecological niche-based) speciation processes, under the scientific umbrella of "The ecological theory of adaptive radiations". This view is increasingly challenged by new data and new organismal model systems, and the aim of this project is to develop these non-ecological alternatives in to a more coherent framework. This will be achieved by preparing an international symposium and a special journal issue on the topic. In particular, the different and interactive roles of niche conservatism, thermal adaptation and learned mate preferences and their role in speciation will be considered.

Fellow: Erik Svensson (Lund)

Wine, Temperance and South African Connectivity c.1900 to the Present
Although wine is often conceived of within bounded national histories, it is a commodity that is best understood within a global framework – especially since the transformations necessitated by the spread of phylloxera in the later nineteenth century. This project, which aims to transcend South African exceptionalism, focuses on three levels of connectivity between South Africa and the wider world in the twentieth century. The first is the exchange of scientific knowledge about viticulture and wine-making between the Cape, Europe, Australasia and North America. The second is the circulation of ideas about quality and taste alongside well-entrenched national (and regional) consumer preferences. The third level is the campaign against the products of the vine championed by a South African temperance coalition that was extremely well-connected to the international temperance movement. Although these are discrete strands, the various linkages between them will also be teased out.

Fellow: Paul Nugent (Edinburgh)

Ecological elimination as a major evolutionary force
Populations fluctuate but seem generally stable in the long run. Species evolve slowly, or even seem to be more or less in “stasis” for much of their existence. Multispecies communities are recognizable over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

The hypothesis is that much of the structure and stability seen at the macro level, in both evolution and ecology, is the result of an ongoing process of selective elimination of unstable or marginal configurations.

Much of biological thinking starts with the view that, given enough time, anything can evolve. The authors think that it is more fruitful to delineate first the forbidden states of ecology and evolution — “forbidden” not because they cannot occur, but because they cannot last.

Selective elimination processes are powerful evolutionary forces, and they are not specific to biological systems. The evolution of the planetary system or, for example, of the rings of Saturn has been driven by the elimination of many physical bodies. It is hypothesized that elimination processes in biology are different only in that the forces of evolution continually generate biological systems that approach or transgress eliminative boundaries, and thus elimination is a never-ending process.

Fellows: Lev Ginzburg (Stony Brook) and John Damuth (Santa Barbara)

Evolutionary perspective on nature
A book entitled Evolutionary Perspectives on Pregnancy (with Columbia University Press) will be completed and published. This will be the third in a trilogy of solo-authored books on unusual reproductive modes, the two prior books having been on Clonality (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Hermaphroditism (Columbia University Press, 2010). Planning for future editions in an annual series of ILE (In the Light of Evolution) colloquia sponsored by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences will also be continued. Six such ILE symposia on diverse biological topics that can be informed by evolutionary thought and have broad societal relevance have been orchestrated by a number of colleagues and it is hoped that this ILE series will be extended to ten annual colloquia total, through the year 2016. The proceedings of these ILE symposia are published as special issues of PNAS and as books from the National Academies Press. 

Fellow: John Avise (Irvine)

Double Vision
This project will be a work of creative non-fiction, exploring issues of identity, boundaries, and vision that have been of concern for many years to a scholar who has been both literary critic and biographer. These issues emerge strongly from the South African experience, but the departure here is that instead of approaching them in the lives and/or work of others as the author has done before, they will be examined from the perspective of his own life—both growing up in South Africa and in his travels and relocations afterwards. In particular, the writer will explore the implications of a birthmark under his right eye which set him apart and came to affect his vision. In this way, though there is no straightforward symmetry, there are wider resonances for a country where markings created both identities and boundaries and profoundly affected ways of seeing. The project also has resonances for a country developing new visions in and through the markings of its birth.

Fellow: Stephen Clingman (Massachusetts)


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