The British Academy/National Research Foundation UK-SA Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture & Technics, 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.
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 mediate 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 into 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.
In its inaugural year (2025), the Chair laid the foundations for a five-year inquiry that will cumulatively span the effects of technology on culture (Year 1), the urban (Year 2), aesthetics and digital arts (Year 3), the question of the university (Year 4), and race (Year 5). The highlight each year is a workshop, which gathers leading scholars to coalesce explorations around a particular theme, and usually there is an exhibition project that coincides. In 2025, it was ‘Culture & Technics’ which included an exhibition, ‘Tales of History Retold’, and a one-day zine-making workshop with Scott Eric Williams. In 2026, the theme is ‘Technics & the Urban’.
The Chair is convened by Prof. Premesh Lalu, the holder of the Chair, assisted by Dr Kim Gurney, its senior researcher. Their respective work on the politics and poetics of contemporary art, aesthetics and its vital role in social imagination informs the Chair’s theoretical backbone, its underlying concern with the sensory order and the impact of technology upon meaning-making. Dr Lee Walters and Dr Reza Khota are the postdoctoral researchers working with The Chair. Weekly convening sessions with postgraduate students, including advanced reading groups, seminars and public talks, as well as the centre’s annual Winter School mid-year, build up towards the three-day intensive workshop in September.
For enquiries, email centreforhumanitiesresearch@uwc.ac.za and Nomahlubi Daweti (ndaweti@uwc.ac.za), who is the administrator of The Chair
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FRAMEWURX, by Scott-Eric Williams
FRAMEWURX (2025) is a limited edition zine created as a companion artefact for ‘Tales of History Retold’ (2025), a group exhibition co-curated by Kim Gurney and Carlyn Strydom at Iyatsiba Lab, University of the Western Cape, and is now available in digital form.
Donation: The Immense Regression – What is Called Caring? Volume 1.
The CHR would like to thank the publisher, K. Verlag, for their generous donation of Bernard Stiegler’s The Immense Regression – What is Called Caring? Vol. 1. to the CHR and fellows of the UK-SA Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture & Technics.
New Publication: Kim Gurney reviews Jay Pather’s edited volume, Restless Infections – Public Art and a Transforming City.
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Iyatsiba Lab: a hub for creative cross-over, A talk by Premesh Lalu.
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Holding a Thought – The puppetry of Ukwanda
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DSTI-NRF Call for Application Endorsements: UK-SA Bilateral Chair in the Digital Humanities and SARChI Chair in Visual History and Theory.
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Publication: Instituting Worlds
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