RESEARCH THEMES
The Research Group works in the following four thematic focus areas:
Knowledge production in Africa and technoscience
- The social epistemology of the appropriation of science and technology in Africa, privileging an African feminist critical framework.
- Interrogation of traditional and prevalent knowledge practices as media and catalysts of people’s participation in technological developments.
- Framing an epistemology for an African Philosophy of Technology.
The impact of advances in AI technology on African subjectivities
- African perspectives on Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life and being human (posthumanism etc).
- The impact of current social-technologies on African personhood and traditional social fabric and values.
- Examinations of the nature and quality of the epistemic agency of Africans in their appropriation of science and technology.
Africa and the designs and deployment social robots
- Applications of Critical Race Theory and Black Feminist theories to the aesthetics of the design and apprehensions of the social-ontology of humanoid robots.
- Contribution to current international, multicultural and transdisciplinary research on the philosophical and neuroscientific questions on human-robot-interaction and communication.
- Simulation of models of effective dialogue between design engineers working on social robotics and non-western philosophers working on the problematique constituting the objective of this research group.
The geo-politics and geo-economics of technology innovation
- Implications of global asymmetries on the power over the design preferences, production and distribution of digital technologies.
- Africa’s ICT infrastructure and trends in innovation; the Digital Divide; African rural women etc.
- Analytical and normative discourse on economic and social justice issues of 4IR.
PROJECTS
- Artificial Intelligence: Its episteme and socio-cultural impacts.
- Towards an African Critical Philosophy of Robotics: Africanizing the Fourth Industrial Revolution (NRF 2020-2023).
- African knowledge systems and technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (UP- RDP 2020).
- Humanoids and Black Women Socio-existentiality.
- Networked society, robosphere and posthumanism: African humanism?
- Traditional African social values in the information age.
- Deployment/welcoming of a teacher-robots in multiracial class.
- Political economy of Fourth Industrial Revolution.
- Robot communication, affectivity, postphenomenology.
ACTIVITIES
- Building of a bibliographical database and an online desktop literature review service.
- Annual Pan-African symposium on African epistemological traditions and Science, Technology and Engineering (17-19 January 2021)
COLLABORATION & PARTNERSHIPS