Shaping the future of technology ethics from Africa

The EthicsLab at the University of Cape Town (UCT) is inviting scholars, artists, and practitioners to join a growing community of practice and inquiry that explores the ethical questions posed by emerging health technologies from African perspectives.

Through residencies, retreats, webinars, and catalyst grants, this Wellcome-funded Research Development Programme offers pathways for participation in an intellectual community that supports critical, creative, and convivial work on technology and ethics.

What does technology ethics look like from an African perspective?

At UCT’s EthicsLab, this question sits at the heart of the programme that has, over the past two years, become a hub for cross-disciplinary inquiry into the ethical, socio-political, and philosophical dimensions of emerging health technologies in fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), neuroscience and genomics. The programme brings together scholars, artists, and practitioners to explore how the African humanities can inform and transform global conversations on technology and ethics. 

Ethics is not only a list of rules but a way of thinking about how we live well together and how our choices, creations, and imaginations contribute to or detract from what we might call a “good life”. In that sense, technology ethics asks how our tools and systems shape the conditions of life: who flourishes within them, who is pushed to the margins, and what forms of care or responsibility we attend to or ignore. It is a practice of noticing what is at stake in the technologies we use and the futures they make possible.

Ethics as worldmaking

At the centre of the programme is the proposition that ethics is worldmaking. Technologies do not merely influence the future – they participate in composing the moral, political, and social worlds we already inhabit. Sometimes they reinforce existing hierarchies, and at other times they unsettle them. The question, then, is not only what technologies do but what kinds of worlds they bring into being and what forms of life we consider desirable or just within them. In this sense, the programme treats ethical inquiry as an act of imagination and responsibility, asking how we might inhabit and design technological futures that sustain rather than diminish human and planetary flourishing.
 

“Ethics, for us, is not a checklist; it is a practice of worldmaking.”

“Ethics, for us, is not a checklist; it is a practice of worldmaking,” said Professor Jantina de Vries, the director of the EthicsLab. “It asks how our technologies and choices shape the worlds we inhabit and challenges us to imagine and create futures that are just, generous, and life-affirming.”

Tracing the entanglements of AI

Among several retreats convened through the programme, two recent gatherings illustrate the EthicsLab’s interdisciplinary and imaginative scope: “AI as Worldmaking: Colonial Dimensions and Planetary Futures” brought together scholars from Africa and Latin America to explore the entanglement of AI with colonialism and to contemplate its planetary politics. The retreat was not only about critique, but about thinking across difference; identifying where African and Latin American experiences with AI, coloniality, and planetary politics intersect and diverge, and using those intersections to imagine solidarities that take the form of shared ethical and political practice capable of resisting extractive technological orders.

“By fostering critical dialogue between African scholars and other Global South thinkers on the urgent issues surrounding AI, the EthicsLab advances the goal of re-centering African knowledge and epistemologies within global AI discourse and grounding AI development in the sociotechnical realities of the continent,” said Dr Yousif Hassan from the University of Michigan.

“More importantly, the EthicsLab helps position African intellectual traditions not as peripheral perspectives, but as foundational to contemporary discussions on AI governance and ethical frameworks.”

“Working with the team has been liberating, especially in thinking about imagination and ethics in relation to AI and what these mean for people in Africa and the Global South.”

“AI and the Imagination” gathered literary scholars, artists, and writers to explore how AI reshapes creativity and aesthetic expression. The retreat traced the conceptual disruptions that AI introduces to ideas of originality, authorship, and authenticity while treating storytelling and creative practice as sites where ethics is already at work. Rather than seeing ethics as rules or frameworks applied from outside, participants considered how it lives within acts of imagination and artistic choice, and how AI might unsettle or transform that inner ethical terrain.

“I have appreciated the creative and curious energy that animates the EthicsLab,” said Dr Mapule Mohulatsi, a lecturer in the Department of English Literary Studies at UCT . “Working with the team has been liberating, especially in thinking about imagination and ethics in relation to AI and what these mean for people in Africa and the Global South. The questions I’ve engaged with through the EthicsLab have been vital to my own work in literary studies and to how I navigate a world where AI, and the ethical frames we bring to it, are becoming increasingly significant.”

Pathways for participation

As the programme expands, the EthicsLab continues to open its doors to those interested in shaping the future of technology ethics from African perspectives. Participants can engage through four key avenues:

• academic retreats
• research residencies
• catalyst grants
• webinar speaking opportunities.

Each of these pathways supports interdisciplinary exploration, creative engagement, and collaboration across borders and fields. Together, they form a convivial research community engaged in sustained reflection on how emerging technologies are transforming what it means to be human.

Applications are open on a rolling basis until 30 September 2026. There is no immediate deadline, and submissions will be reviewed as they are received.

Visit the EthicsLab website to learn more, apply, or participate in upcoming opportunities.