Faeeza Ballim
is an historian and senior lecturer based at the Department of History at the University of Johannesburg. She holds an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford and a PhD in History from the University of the Witwatersrand. Her book entitled Apartheid’s Leviathan: Electricity and the Power of Technological Ambivalence, was published by Ohio University Press in April 2023. Her main scholarly interest is to bring insights from Science and Technology Studies to bear on key themes in African history, initially through the consideration of dynamics in large energy-related infrastructure projects.
Kevin P. Donovan
is a Lecturer in African Studies and International Development at the Centre of African Studies at the University of Edinburgh. His book, Money, Value & the State: Economic Sovereignty & Citizenship in East Africa, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024. He has also written on economies of data and debt, infrastructure and surveillance, and corporate-state relations.
Véra Ehrenstein
is a full-time CNRS researcher in Science and Technology Studies based at the Centre d’étude des mouvements sociaux, Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her research explores the sciences and politics of climate change in a variety of contexts in Europe, Africa, and North America. She has written on topics such as carbon markets and tropical forest governance. She is the co-author of Can Markets Solve Problems? An Empirical Inquiry into Neoliberalism in Action, published by Goldsmiths Press in 2019.
Jonathan Klaaren
is Professor of Law and Society at the University of the Witwatersrand in the Law School and at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) in the Faculty of Humanities. He works in the areas of competition and regulation, the legal profession, migration and citizenship, and sociolegal studies. His most recent sole-authored book is From Prohibited Immigrants to Citizens: The Origins of Citizenship and Nationality in South Africa, UCT Press, 2017. He holds a Phd in sociology from Yale University and law degrees from Columbia University (JD) and Wits (LLB). In 2016, he served as an Acting Judge for the High Court of South Africa.
is a visiting research fellow based at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) at the University of Witwatersrand and a practicing architect. She holds a Masters of Architecture from the University of the Witwatersrand and an MSc in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science. Bronwyn is a PhD candidate at the University of Cape Town and has lectured widely at multiple universities. Her research examines the sociomaterial politics of cement in Sub-Saharan Africa as a lens to explore her broader scholarly interests in the relationship between materiality, science, technology, and space. She has worked internationally in multidisciplinary teams on a wide range of award-winning projects across architecture, design, and academic research.
Emma Park
is an Assistant Professor of History at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, New York, where she teaches courses on modern Africa, science and technology, global histories of capitalism, and the history of development. Her current research focuses on infrastructure development projects including roads, radio and Kenya’s now-famed telephonic banking service, M-PESA to explore transformations in capitalism and state-craft. Her book manuscript tentatively entitled, Infrastructural Attachments: Technologies, Mobility, and the Tensions of Home in Colonial and Postcolonial Kenya, challenges the seemingly apolitical nature of infrastructures along which state authority extends, binding citizens both to one another and to their state.
Helen Robertson
is a lecturer based at the School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of the Witwatersrand, were she currently teaches logic, elementary theory of computation, and the applied ethics of data science. She trained in philosophy at the same university in Johannesburg and received her PhD from University College London. She has research interests in contemporary epistemology and the epistemology and ethics of artificial intelligence. She has guest edited a special edition for the South African Journal of Philosophy that focuses on the philosophical and ethical questions raised by the technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Richard Rottenburg
is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at the Wits Institute of Social and Economic Research (WiSER), University of the Witwatersrand. His work has been inspired by renditions of post-foundational social theory and material-semiotic
René Umlauf
is based at the Centre for International Health Protection at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. He worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Anthropology at Martin-Luther-University, Halle, after receiving his PhD in Sociology from the University of Bayreuth in 2015. In 2020 he joined the Department of Sociology at Leipzig University where he started a project on humanitarian drone infrastructures entitled Processes of Spatialization under the Global Condition, at the Collaborative Research Centre. His research focuses on conceptual and methodological implications of technological change.
Helen Verran
holds positions as Professor at Charles Darwin University and an honorary position in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, where she taught for nearly twenty-five years. She has written many articles on numbers that ask about the work they do in different cultures and societies. Her book Science and an African Logic, University of Chicago Press, 2001, articulates the logic that Yoruba numbers express, showing it as profoundly different than that of modern numbers, which are derived from the blending of numbers originating in Indian, European, and Semitic cultures.