The University of Cape Town invites you to an inaugural lecture by Professor Jantina de Vries.

Another world is necessary: ethics as a tool for worldmaking

In an increasingly unsettled and imperfect world, our scholarship – the science we pursue, the technologies we develop, and the topics we teach – needs to actively work to make the world a better place for everyone. Yet technological innovations are developing at breakneck speed, enveloping each of us in a web of connections with little opportunity for reflection, limited control, and uncertain impact on our collective ability to live well, together. Against that context, it is easy to feel overwhelmed. In this lecture, ethics is positioned as a space for collective stock-taking: for reflecting on the worlds we aspire to, the people we seek to serve, and a way of coming together around a shared vision of more just and inclusive futures.

At a personal level, ethics invites engagement with difficult and enduring questions: what it means to show up with integrity; when and how such commitments are compromised; and how to live well in an unethical world. At the level of scholarship, ethics presses further, interrogating what makes academic work meaningful – who it serves, who it erases, how it entrenches the structural injustices that uphold the status quo and what to do about that.

Reflecting on experiences in genomics, artificial intelligence, and neuroscience, the lecture positions deep and constant ethical reflexivity about our scholarship, our ethical desires, and our blind spots as an essential tool to ensuring that we are neither naïve nor misguided about our impact or responsibilities. From this disposition emerges an understanding of ethics not only as critique, but as method: a way of engaging in sustained dialogue across disciplines and beyond the academy. In this sense, ethics becomes a practice of worldmaking – of collectively imagining and working toward the kinds of worlds we hope to inhabit, and situating scholarship within that broader project.

About our speaker

Jantina de Vries is founding and current director of the EthicsLab and Professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Cape Town. Her work sits at the intersection of global health ethics, genomics, and emerging technologies, with a particular focus on how ethical reflection can guide more just and equitable forms of science. She has led and contributed to numerous international research collaborations, especially in Africa, examining issues such as data governance, research equity, stigma in research, and ethical practices like informed consent, community engagement and so forth. Working with colleagues across the university, in 2023 she set up the EthicsLab at UCT, as a space that cultivates convivial scholarship and celebrates transdisciplinarity.

At the EthicsLab, Jantina leads three core grants: a Wellcome Trust Research Development Programme that seeks to articulate how knowledge from the African humanities could and should inform on the ethics of new and emerging health technologies; a Fogarty International Centre (NIH) award that developed and implements an MSc in Global Health Ethics degree that centres Africa as the context and driver for ethics; and a Wellcome Trust Discovery Award that focuses on developing a global health solidarity index for global health funders.

Jantina is a member of many governance and advisory committees, including a past member of the WHO Genome Editing Expert Advisory Committee; the Ethics Board of Médecins Sans Frontières; the H3Africa Steering Committee; the and the founding Chair of the H3Africa Working Group on Ethics. She is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the Global Forum for Bioethics in Research based at the World Health Organisation, the Wellcome Trust Advisory Committee for Lower and Middle Income Countries, and the Scientific Advisory Committee for the STRong HEART network based at the SAMRC. She has published over 150 articles in international peer reviewed journals and is an NRF B2 rated researcher.

EthicsLab website: https://health.uct.ac.za/ethics-lab

ORCID profile: https://orcid.org/my-orcid?orcid=0000-0001-7192-2633

Google Scholar profile: https://scholar.google.co.za/citations?user=aT-TJQgAAAAJ&hl=en

Date: Thursday, 25 June 2026
Time: 18:00 SAST
Venue: Neuroscience Institute Auditorium, Groote Schuur Hospital, Observatory

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