Rooted in JIAS’s commitment to transdisciplinary thought, URGENT/EMERGENT seminar and conversation series convenes urgent debates on pressing global questions—from climate collapse and AI to democracy, violence, and freedom.

  • The Machine & the Margin. 15.06.2025

    On 15 May 2025, Professor Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, Director of the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) and Prof Anaïs Nony, Senior Researcher at JIAS on “AI & Life Matters”, launched the URGENT/EMERGENT seminar and conversation series with an event titled “The Machine and the Margins”. Literary and digital scholars, Dr. Carrie Timlin and Dr. Colette Gordon presented their research on AI-resistant teaching and learning in the wake of generative Artificial Intelligence in higher education.

  • Echoes in the Sublime. 31.07.2025

    This session interrogates the intersections of attention, aesthetics, and the Anthropocene, drawing on Shabangu’s latest essay, “Zombies,” Attention, and the Sublime in the Digital Anthropocene (2025, European Journal of Literature, Culture, and Environment).

    The essay offers a meta-critique of the aesthetic and political dimensions of “the Anthropocene sublime,” using Baloji’s short film Zombies (2019) as a lens to interrogate pressing questions about our digitally saturated present:

    ·       What happens to the sublime in an age of fractured attention?

    ·       How does the crisis of attention shape our engagement with ecological and political crises? 

    ·       Can aesthetic experience still provoke critical consciousness in the Capitalocene? 

    ·       What temporalities emerge when we resist the speed of networked capitalism? 

  • Coming soon. 21.08.2025

    Dr. Phokeng Tshepo Setai, senior curator at Zeitz Mocaa in conversation with JIAS curator and PhD candidate Danielle Bowler

  • Coming soon. 09.10.2025

    Leopold Lambert, chief editor of The Funambulist Magazine in conversation with JIAS archivist Nombuso Mathibela