WISER Seminar Papers

WISER is very pleased to host the Wits Interdisciplinary Seminar in the Humanities. The presentations for the remainder of the current academic semester are listed below.

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, and the past papers of the current semester, is available here. A printable version of the seminar schedule for the current year is available here.

  • The WISH seminar will continue to be held on-line for the foreseeable future; for the details of the Zoom meetings, please sign up for email notices at https://wiser.wits.ac.za/mail.
  • Participants must read the paper prior to the seminar.
  • The paper will typically only be available on the Friday preceding the seminar.
  • Date Author/s 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