Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research

15/09/2026

WISER | African Trust Infrastructures | Call for Doctoral Fellowship Applications

With generous support from Standard Bank for the second phase of the African Trust Infrastructures project, WISER invites applications for 3-year full-time doctoral fellowships OR 5-year part-time doctoral fellowships to be awarded to outstanding students from Political Science, History, Anthropology, Economics, Sociology, Law or any other related or appropriate discipline.

Fellows will be expected to research topics associated with the Trust Project, such as histories and contemporary analyses of credit and lending, digital population registration and finance systems currently under development on the continent.

(Please send questions about the research to Dr Laura Phillips at [email protected], with a subject including the phrase “Trust doctoral fellowship.”)

The full-time programme is not compatible with other employment. Fellows will be expected to work closely with research staff and to participate fully, on site, in the intellectual life of the Institute. Full-time fellows will receive funding for three years; the package for the first year will be R250 000. This will cover university fees, research expenses and provide a living allowance. Some additional assistance with conference and research funding may also be available. Fellows will be required to undertake up to 5 hours work a week for WiSER.

The part-time programme can be done in combination with other employment, but part-time fellows should be based in Johannesburg and find ways to at least partially participate in the intellectual life of the Institute. Part-time fellows will receive funding for their tuition but will not receive any support for their living expenses. Some additional assistance with conference and research funding may also be available.

Deadline : Sunday, 15 November 2026 - 11:00pm

11/09/2026

Today, we celebrate an important milestone in the life of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) : 25 years of conversations, questions, research and the building of a global network of scholarly enquiry.

As we mark this special milestone, we want to say thank you to the network that has made WiSER what it is.

Thank you for your encouragement, challenging questions and your generosity. Thank you to everyone who has walked through our door, joined a seminar, participated in a public conversation, launched a book, collaborated with us, shared research, drafted a funding proposal, or asked a question. These are the acts that have created the intellectual life at WiSER.

We are especially proud of the generations of fellows and emerging scholars whose careers have nurtured WiSER, and who have gone on to make their own important contributions to institutions, to scholarship and our society. That work is WiSER’s most important achievement. Here’s to the next 25 years of thinking, questioning, learning together and to the many conversations, collaborations and ideas still ahead.

Happy 25th Anniversary, WiSER 🎉

09/09/2026

WISER and the SA-UK SARChI Chair in the Digital Humanities warmly invite you to join us for a Chatham House lunchtime seminar on :

AI in the African University
The African Humanities after the AI rupture.

The seminar will bring together people with interests in this area from across the university to consider a number of related problems.

Thursday, 17 September 2026
12:00pm
WISER Seminar Room,
6th Floor, Richard Ward Building

Is the Sarah Connor strategy – a deliberate policy of isolating our selves and lives from the infrastructures of machine intelligence – a viable one?
Does the adoption of AI within the humanities allow us to pursue philosophical problems that are both novel and potentially liberating?
What does the universal adoption of AI agents do to the humanities project of reading and writing, and what are the likely effects on the university?
How do current university policies -- at WIts and elsewhere -- help us to navigate and address these problems?
What can we learn from comparing the US and the Chinese approaches to the adoption and regulation of AI systems?

To support the discussion we have assembled a short list of short readings :

The recent substack from Arvind Narayanan “What will be left for us to work on?” https://substack.com/home/post/p-206741609;

A recent lecture from Iginio Gagliardone in the SSRC’s African Peacebuilding and Developmental Dynamics Programme;

Overview reports on the Hugging Face attack from Casey Newton and Zvi Mowshowitz;

Something like the official line from the Chinese Communist Party on AI regulation from Pekingnology;

A detailed Bloomberg report on the reception of Chinese open weight models;
And the Faculty of Humanities' summaries of AI policy.

We also recommend that people interested in these problems attend the Dwolatzky Memorial Lecture by Shakir Mohamed next Wednesday, September 16, or watch it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Go2IBLzdVZA

Please RSVP for catering purposes to [email protected].

03/09/2026

MUHOLI ART INSTITUTE and WiSER PRESENT KHULULEKANI: 20 YEARS OF FACES AND PHASES
Johannesburg, South Africa - September 2026

The Muholi Art Institute, in collaboration with the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER), presents Khululekani, an exhibition marking 20 years of Zanele Muholi’s landmark and ongoing photographic series, Faces and Phases.

Initiated in 2006, Faces and Phases has become an expansive photographic archive of Black LGBTQIA+ lives in South Africa and beyond. Through an ongoing practice of portraiture, Muholi has photographed members of the community across two decades, creating a body of work concerned with presence, memory, identity, and representation.

Khululekani invites audiences to encounter Faces and Phases as an ongoing record of
lives in motion, shaped by return, relation and the enduring act of being present.

Opening Event

8 September 2026
17:00–21:00
WiSER, 6th Floor, Richard Ward Building, East Campus,
Wits University, Johannesburg

RSVP: [email protected] by 7 September 2026

~ Exhibition Dates ~
8 September – 8 October 2026

Media Enquiries
For interviews, images, and additional information, please contact: Muholi Art Institute [email protected]

Khululekani brings this twenty-year history into focus through a selection of portraits
that reflect the continued development of the series and the lives of those represented
within it. Central to the exhibition is the act of return. Several participants photographed
during the early years of Faces and Phases have been encountered again over time,
allowing the archive to register change alongside continuity.
Seen together, these portraits resist the idea of the photographic archive as a fixed
record of the past. Instead, they reveal an archive in motion, shaped by the lives,
histories and ongoing presence of the people within it.

The exhibition’s presentation in Johannesburg carries particular significance. Faces and
Phases returns to the city where the project began, twenty years after its first portraits
were made. Opening at the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere, Khululekani
also considers ideas of growth, return and becoming, reflecting on what unfolds when
people are encountered again across time.
Over the past two decades, Faces and Phases has travelled internationally, bringing its
expansive archive into dialogue with audiences across diWerent contexts. Khululekani
oWers an opportunity to return to the series at a significant moment in its history while
recognising that the work remains ongoing.

The exhibition takes place as Muholi marks another significant milestone, following
their recognition with the Hasselblad Award for their pioneering contribution to
photography.

01/09/2026

Invitation to the Launch of

Please RSVP as there is limited space. Danko! 🙏🏾

You can get your own copy. The book is now available on all bookstores.

25/08/2026

🐦 Avian Encounters: Bird/Human Relations

Join us for the 5th seminar session with Madhumita Lahiri, exploring birds, cinema & human–bird relations through All That Breathes and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge.

📅 31 Aug | ⏰ 16:00–17:00 SAST
🔗 Zoom: https://shorturl.at/rfZZP
📃Paper: https://tinyurl.com/63smj7wp

22/08/2026

Hlonipha Mokoena reflects on the enduring relevance of Virginia Woolf’s argument that women need financial security and personal space to write, highlighting the persi...

22/08/2026

09/04/2026

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