Specifically, we are interested to understand the consequences of technology on culture. To this end, our study is focused on how humanistic discourse and arts practices mediates understandings of the expansion in technological resources in the scientific revolutions from the nineteenth century to the present. The chair invites graduate students, faculty, and artists in residence at the CHR and UWC more broadly an inquiry of the cultural effects of scientific revolutions in thermodynamics, psychotechnics/psychophysics, and cybernetics, and their consequences for debates about techno-feudalism, partition and difference, ecology and environmentality, biopolitics, life philosophy, magical realism, and science fiction amongst others.
Related News
February 19, 2025
The British Academy/National Research Foundation UK-SA Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Cultures of Technology, held by Professor Premesh Lalu in the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR), convenes an international study network that traces how the exercise of power relates to the co-evolution of the human and technology.
January 13, 2025
The CHR is delighted to announce that Professor Premesh Lalu has been awarded the British Academy/NRF UK-SA Bilateral Chair in the Digital Humanities.
August 26, 2024
In August 2024, a CHR delegation met with leadership and Humanities and Social Sciences colleagues at Sol Plaatje University to discuss future collaborations and joint research initiatives.
November 7, 2023
We are pleased to announce the 2023 Ghent Africa Platform Lecture by Premesh Lalu in Honour of Nelson Mandela, which will take place at the Greatmore Humanities Hub on 13 November 2023.
October 6, 2023
The CHR hosted its annual Winter School in August at the Greatmore Humanities Hub in Woodstock, Cape Town.
July 20, 2023
The recording for a book launch of Premesh Lalu’s Undoing Apartheid is now available via the below link.
June 5, 2023
A Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS) Lecture
May 29, 2023
The CHR's Premesh Lalu’s much anticipated new book, Undoing Apartheid, appears in November 2022 with Polity Press. The book responds to the CHR’s inaugural question of the meaning of post-apartheid freedom, especially through sustained research projects on aesthetic education, the becoming technical of the human, and communicating the humanities
March 23, 2023
The Jackman Humanities Institute (JHI), University of Toronto, held an online book launch and panel discussion of Premesh Lalu's Undoing Apartheid, on Tuesday, 14 March.
January 23, 2023
Join the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs for the book launch of Premesh Lalu's Undoing Aprtheid.
July 13, 2022
Premesh Lalu’s documentary film, The Double Future’s of Athlone, which was sold out at the Encounters documentary film festival in Cape Town and Johannesburg, will be screened online at the Durban International Film Festival from July 21-30, 2022.
June 22, 2022
Founding CHR director and filmmaker Premesh Lalu will be in conversation with Rashid Lombard, Jayson King, Sylvia Mndunyelwa and Dinga Sikwebu about his new film The Double Futures of Athlone at the Encounters South African Documentary International Film Festival. The panel will be moderated by Valmont Layne.