The second stream combines conceptual, methodological, and practical experimentation in the Digital Humanities. It takes seriously the exhortations of Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Achille Mbembe of promoting decolonisation as a process of re-centering.
It firmly roots research in/from Africa, not to create a new form of “epistemic superiority”, a seizure of power by other actors generating new hegemonies and rigidities but to illustrate in actuality the productive capacities of a “critical cosmopolitan pluriversalism, embrac[ing] a horizontal strategy of openness to dialogue among different epistemic traditions” (Mbembe).
This stream also re-centres the Digital Humanities in the “Humanities”, resisting prevailing assumptions whereby digital tools are assumed to have power to best enhance the study of a specific discipline or problem, and reversing the relationship by creating spaces for fundamental questions in the humanities to find answers through a critical engagement with the digital.
In order to move from “manifesto” approaches to discovering how this process of re-centering can inform new modes of research, this stream recognises the need to concretely and iteratively interact with the specificities of the human world and generate new methods of inquiry. A comparative approach is encouraged in ways that both acknowledge and defy traditional patterns of comparative analysis, critically reflecting on persistent approaches of the North studying the South and encouraging new ways for the South to study the North.
Research in each stream is structured along 8 projects, each testing the interaction between the humanities, digital practices, and digital tools, from distinctive perspectives.
Information Disorder
This project both acknowledges and challenges normative approaches to the study of mis/disinformation and conspiracy theories, recognising the plurality of ways in which rumours and half-truths can both undermine and sustain community building. It builds on and expands existing work that has combined de-colonial thinking and analysis of large datasets from social media interactions.
Digital Activism
Once a main focus of research on digital media, digital activism has been drowned by concerns about information disorder. This project seeks to avoid falling for academic and policy trends and produce rich empirical evidence on how individuals and communities continue to use digital media to challenge authority and produce change. This project will pay particular attention to activism on climate change, gender-based violence, and access to justice.
African Knowledge and Citation Practices
This project examines how knowledge produced in Africa is taken up within postgraduate research. Responding to wider calls to transform higher education and affirm the centrality of African scholarship, the project develops digital methods to analyse citation practices across Masters and PhD theses, asking when, where and how African and Africa-based researchers are cited, and whether these practices have shifted over time. The project aims to build a replicable methodology that can be expanded across time, institutions and regions, contributing to broader debates on knowledge production, epistemic justice and the digital study of scholarly practice.
Mental Health in the Digital South
This project investigates how digital platforms are reshaping mental health knowledge, advocacy and care in South Africa and the wider Digital South. As social media and AI-powered chatbots become increasingly important sources of health information, the boundaries between professional advice, anecdotal experience, automated content and misinformation are becoming harder to distinguish. Combining computational social science methods with qualitative phenomenological enquiry, the project seeks to understand both large-scale patterns of online discourse and the lived experiences of users, activists and communities.
Comparative Futurisms
This project makes use of text mining and NLP to uncover converging and diverging patterns emerging from science fiction imageries in literature and the arts from Africa, Asia, and South America. Science fiction is interpreted here not just as a genre, but as an opportunity to critique and test different social imageries in ways that can inspire different types of relationships between individuals, societies, as well as with technical artefacts.
Experimental Modelling
This project makes use of and further curates existing repositories (e.g. social and economic histories of distinct African communities) and combines them with Gen-AI to produce imaginaries of what different African societies could be like if past forms of social and political interaction could be taken to scale.
Smart Cities
Incorporating some of the most critical tensions introduced by advancement in AI, in relation to their social and political consequences, smart cities both promise improvements in urban life and risk further entrenching power imbalances. This project combines critical advances in the digital humanities and science and technology studies to analyse how digital innovation intersects with urban life. While challenging “smartwashing” as a process to find technical fixes to social problems, research for this project seeks to identify technologies able to address social needs and advance shared policies.
AI for Social Good
This project focuses on rural spaces where competing agendas coexist and emphasises why some applications of AI are prioritised and others marginalised in different polities and contexts where different political ideologies and developmental programmes are being crafted and deployed. Similarly to the previous projects, it questions the hype and blind faith in technical fixes, seeking to advance approaches that begin with a critical interrogation of existing challenges among communities, and the identification of appropriate technologies.
