RESEARCH THEMES

The Research Group works in the following four thematic focus areas:

Knowledge production in Africa and technoscience

  1. The social epistemology of the appropriation of science and technology in Africa, privileging an African feminist critical framework.
  2. Interrogation of traditional and prevalent knowledge practices as media and catalysts of people’s participation in technological developments.
  3. 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