The Wellcome Research Development Programme at the EthicsLab explores the intersection between new and emerging health technologies, ethics, and the African humanities, fostering cross-disciplinary research and research capacity through various coordinated activities.
Our innovative programme delves into technological innovation in areas like Artificial Intelligence (AI), neuroscience, and genomics, given their potential to radically transform what it means to be human. In an interconnected world of global and local hierarchies where these developments touch everyone, it is crucial to incorporate diverse global perspectives in ethical thinking. In response, the EthicsLab positions itself as an exciting multi-disciplinary platform for scholars from Africa and beyond to explore how the African humanities could and should inform the ethical questions posed by new and emerging technologies and vice versa.
A vital goal of this programme is to open up convivial, critical spaces and opportunities for reflection and debate for scholars across the African continent working in sciences and humanities. We are also excited about the potential for science and technological innovation to create new opportunities for researchers in the African humanities.
Our understanding of ‘Africa’
When we speak about ‘Africa’ or ‘African’ in our work, we do not want to essentialise African thought or romanticise its precolonial history. We also do not want to limit ourselves to particular geographical, racial, or national prisms. The ‘Africa’ we are interested in is represented in the minds and works of people who place African interests and identities at the heart of their work, and as such, provides for the compositeness of being and becoming African as a permanent work in progress. This expansive understanding of Africa includes people born and residing on the continent, those who now live and work elsewhere (the recent African diaspora), and those who hail from elsewhere.
Engagement and impact
We are excited to connect with people interested in empirically, conceptually, or theoretically leveraging Africa to articulate and respond to the ethical questions stimulated by new and emerging technologies. We have four distinct opportunities available, which you may apply for individually or jointly (See call for expressions of interest). They are:
- Webinars: We regularly host webinars and would like to receive proposals for webinars, including topics and speakers.
- Academic retreats: We have funding to host academic retreats, which are meetings lasting 3 to 4 days and involving up to 15 South African, other African, and international participants. We invite proposals for retreats that we would co-host on one of the topics below.
- Academic residencies: We can host African scholars working at the intersection of African humanities and technology for up to three months to work with us on a topic of their choice. The retreats cover the costs of flights, accommodation, and a small per diem to cover expenses.
- Small stipends: We have funding for small stipends (up to USD 7,000) for research projects on one of the topics below.The politics of voice and knowledge production in the ethics domain
We are particularly interested in proposals on the following non-exhaustive list of possible themes:
- Power and order: Technology as a political and ideological project
- Climate justice and planetary ethics
- The political economy of emerging technologies
- Digital colonialism, imperialism, and decolonisation
- Data justice
- Humanism, posthumanism, and transhumanism in African thought.
- Relationality and moral status in African theory.
Ultimately, the program aims to cultivate a thriving network of scholars from Africa and elsewhere who will come together to think and write, exploring different and complementary perspectives on the ethics of new and emerging health technologies, using Africa as a context and point of reference.
