WISER Seminar Papers

  • WISER's TRUST seminar is hosted on-line every Monday afternoon from 16:00 - 17:00 SA time during the teaching semester. Forthcoming seminars are available here, and past events are detailed in our archive.
  • Please register on Zoom in advance of the meeting on this link.
  • Participants should please read the paper (below) prior to the seminar, which is typically available by the Friday preceding the seminar.


WISER, and its predecessor institutions the Institute for Advanced Study and the African Studies Institute, have hosted similar seminars that date back to the late 1960s. The archive of those events is also available on the WISER web site at http://wiser.wits.ac.za.
Date Presented by Title
Monday, 23 February, 2026 - 16:00
  • Kevin
  • Donovan
 Withheld in Trust: Withholding-while-Giving in Parastatal Philanthropy
Monday, 2 March, 2026 - 16:00
  • Laura
  • Lambert
 Brokers of citizenship. Justices of the peace as intermediaries in Sierra Leone’s digital identification project
Monday, 9 March, 2026 - 16:00
  • Harsha
  • Man Maharjan
 Foreign Aid and the Development of Digital National Identification in Nepal
Monday, 16 March, 2026 - 16:00
  • Sarah
  • Saddler
“Why Are We Here? Money.”: Industrial Theatre and the Cultural Logics of Extraction in South Africa
Monday, 30 March, 2026 - 16:00
  • Justin Willis
  • Radha Upadhyaya & Eric Njuguna
 Harambee Co-operative Savings and Credit Society: Wealth, Inequality, and Accumulation in 1970s Kenya
Monday, 13 April, 2026 - 16:00
  • Daniel
  • Mwesigwa
 Risk, Data, Alignment: Making Credit Scoring Work in Kenya
Monday, 20 April, 2026 - 16:00
  • Eddie
  • Higgs
 Expressions and Emotion Detection from Reading Faces (Routledge, 2026)
Monday, 4 May, 2026 - 16:00
  • Tara
  • Weinberg
 African Land buying Syndicates in early 20th century KZN
Monday, 11 May, 2026 - 16:00
  • Keren
  • Weitzberg
 The Kipande and The Mau Mau Passbook : from Fingerprint of Empire
Monday, 18 May, 2026 - 16:00
  • Gregory
  • Gondwe
 AI-Driven Disinformation and Political Influence on WhatsApp in South Africa’s 2024 Elections
Monday, 25 May, 2026 - 16:00
  • Nimi
  • Hoffmann
 Between crisis and refusal: academic freedom as public argument
Monday, 1 June, 2026 - 16:00
  • Cecilia
  • Passanti
 The Civil History of Biometric Computers : Linking the 1960s African Independences to the Rise of Western Security Infrastructure