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.