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.

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.

This event centres on Dr. Phokeng Setai's curatorial approach and latest landmark exhibition, which “engages the public life of Albie Sachs to narrate the intertwined artistic and political histories of two nations: Mozambique and South Africa. It recognises that revolution unfolds along a continuum, and it honours the many struggles for freedom that came before Sachs, and those still to come carrying forward the spirit and ideas of Moses Kotane, Ruth First, Oliver Tambo, and countless others, Sachs’ life and contributions act as a vessel for collective memory. 

Prof. Prah’s monograph, Legacies of Forced Removals in South Africa: Children and Childhoods in Temporary Relocation Areas in the Western Cape (Anthem Press, 2025) delves into the lives of six children from diverse backgrounds living in temporary relocation areas in Cape Town. Through their poignant narratives, the book explores the enduring impacts of forced removals, displacement, and systemic marginality on children’s lifeworlds. It critically examines the fractures in housing policy and governance, offering invaluable insights for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners in urban planning, housing, and social development. 

Leopold Lambert, chief editor of The Funambulist Magazine in conversation with JIAS archivist Nombuso Mathibela. The Funambulist is an editorial project initiated by Léopold Lambert in 2010, dedicated to the politics of space and bodies. The Funambulist is a trilingual paper and online magazine dedicated to the politics of space and bodies, and the cultivation of internationalist solidarities between anticolonial, antiracist, queer, and feminist struggles. 

Dr. Sara Baranzoni, chief editor of La Deleuziana in conversation with JIAS senior researcher Dr. Anaïs Nony