东京热

Prof Mongane Wally Serote – ACEPS Honorary Professor
Interests: South African poet, writer and political activist.
Mongane is a veteran and stalwart of the African struggle; he is a writer, and a Fullbright scholar who is also an African intellectual if being an intellectual means permanently incubating and innovating ideas to contribute to quality of life and a liveable world for all forms of life.

Dr Dimpho Takane Maponye
Interests: African Philosophy, Feminism, Decolonisation, Epistemic Injustice.
Dimpho is a senior philosophy Lecturer at the 东京热. Her doctoral thesis title was: Decolonisation, African Feminism and the Contradiction of African Praxes: Pragmatism as a Mediating Force. She joined the department in 2015 as a tutor, in 2019 she was appointed assistant lecturer,聽 successfully defended her PhD viva, obtained her tenure in 2023 and awarded her PhD in 2024. Dimpho has received postgraduate awards including UJ鈥檚 University Research Committee scholarship and a South African Women in Science Masters’ fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology. Supervises: Honours, MA, PhD

Kelly Makola
Interests: Completing her聽 PhD at the Department of Communication and Media
Kelly is an administrative assistant at ACEPS. Her research focus is on political communication looking at the mediation of political messaging and the use of digital media and technologies in elections. She is also a research participant for the transitional justice research project at the Centre for Public Authority and International Development at LSE.

Dr Paige Benton
Interests:聽Political Philosophy, Rawlsian Philosophy, Political Epistemology, AI Ethics, AI Governance
Paige received her PhD from the University of Pretoria, funded by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence Research (CAIR). Her research is situated between two subdisciplines namely political philosophy and the Ethics of Artificial intelligence (AI). Her PhD research was noteworthy for her reconceptualization of the right and the good as interdependent relations on a continuum. Paige seeks to address the evolving challenges posed by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, particularly in the context of information dissemination through social media and its impact on the stability of democratic societies.聽Supervises:听Honours, MA, PhD

Dr Shen茅 de Rijk
Interests: Applied Ethics, Social Epistemology, Epistemic Injustice
Shen茅 de Rijk completed her PhD with ACEPS in 2025. Her thesis centred on the phenomenon of toxic positivity and the value of the concept in social epistemology. She has published articles in applied ethics and social epistemology. Her research interests include ethics, social epistemology, psychological phenomena, trust and self-trust, and philosophy of emotion and the connections that can be drawn between these fields. Her planned postdoc projects include developing a theory of non-intentional gaslighting and expanding the concept of toxic positivity to include an affective dimension. Supervises: Honours, MA

Dr Martin Miragoli
Interests: Epistemology, Political Philosophy, Feminist & Decolonial Theory and the Ethics of AI
Martin received his PhD from the University of Glasgow, where he was part of the COGITO Epistemology Research Centre. Martin鈥檚 research focuses mainly on epistemology, with a special focus on issues of justice and decolonisation. In the past few years, he has been writing about the impact of feminist perspectives and critical race theory on the way we understand the functioning of new generative AI technologies, as well as on the way we theorise about central epistemological concepts, including knowledge and justification. Supervises: Honours, MA, PhD

Dr Dimpho Moletsane
Interests: Social Epistemology, Identity, Political Theory, Ethics & Metaphysics of AI
Dimpho Moletsane is a recent ACEPS PhD-graduand. His graduate research explored key questions about the Rainbow Nation as South Africa鈥檚 post-Apartheid dispensation, and argued that its core tenets entail and motivate certain social, moral, epistemic, affective, and political commitments. 聽Building on this work, his post-doctoral research draws on scholarship in social epistemology, 4E cognition, and prefigurative politics to engage in critical interdisciplinary inquiry into debates surrounding the political projects of post-conflict societies and nation-building. Supervises: Honours, MA

Visiting Professor from Northwestern University
Interests: Critical Race and Gender/Queer theory
Jos茅 is Walter Dill Scott Professor of Philosophy with affiliations in the Department of African American Studies and the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies. His work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality and his primary fields of expertise are critical race theory, gender/queer theory, Black and Latinx feminisms, communication theory, applied philosophy of language, social epistemology, and political philosophy.

Prof Nancy Jecker 聽Visiting Professor & Professor of Bioethics & Humanities at University of Washington School of Medicine and a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for 2021/22.
Interests: Bioethics
Nancy is the author (with Lawrence Schneiderman) of Wrong Medicine: Doctors, Patients and Futile Treatment, 2nd edition (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), and the editor (with Albert Jonsen and Robert Pearlman) of Bioethics: An Introduction to the History, Methods, and Practice, 3rd Edition (Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 2011). Her articles have appeared in The Journal of the American Medical Association, The American Journal of Bioethics, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and other publications.

Visiting Professor from Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Interests: Social Epistemology of the Internet
Karen’s research focuses on the epistemology and ethics of trust. In my research and teaching I ask the following questions: What is trust? What is the role of trust in knowledge, science, and the internet? How can I be a responsible & trustworthy knower in a world of power and privilege? Why have feminist philosophers found trust to be a particularly useful concept? How can I be trustworthy in my personal life, professional life, leadership role, and civic life? What is betrayal? How is trust betrayed and manipulated by individuals and institutions?

Nadia Ellis
Interests: Epistemology of Education, Epistemic Injustice, Ubuntu Philosophy,聽Decolonisation
Nadia completed her MA in 2024 and is now a Philosophy Doctoral candidate at ACEPS, 东京热. Nadia works in the EdTech and publishing industry as an Academic Manager. Motivated by the epistemic injustice in e-learning and publishing theory and practice, she is currently working on establishing an Ubuntu-enriched Epistemology of Education in her MA. Her hope is to use this epistemology in future projects to ground educational paradigms and pedagogy and construct more inclusive digital and print content creation practices. Her ultimate objective is to contribute to the production of decolonised learning solutions for higher education in South Africa.

Nomaswazi Kubeka
Interests: African Philosophy,Epistemic Injustice and Oppression, Metaethics, Philosophy of Language
Nomaswazi is a philosophy doctoral candidate at ACEPS, University of Johanneburg. Her Honour鈥檚 research focused on the Metaethics of Ubuntu and her master鈥檚 was on African Indigenous Languages and Epistemic Oppression which she obtained with distinction.

M Lombaard
Interests: Decoloniality, ecophilosophy, power, identity, activism, degrowth, political philosophy
M is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the 东京热, working on the thinking around and practices of resistance to climate change and climate coloniality. They completed their MA on political conceptions of equality at the Centre for Diversity Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in 2022, and their Honours on collective responsibility at the University of Pretoria in 2019.

Francis Mkandawire
Interests:Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, Epistemic Injustice, and Moral Philosophy
Francis is an聽 MA student in Philosophy at ACEPS, 东京热. His Honours research focused on defending feminism in response to a 2003 article by Rita Gross. His current MA research looks at how Epistemic Injustice shows up in Generative and Predictive AI, using ideas from Ubuntu to think about more ethical ways of developing and using these technologies.

Lerato Motsoahole
Interests: African medical epistemology and AI
Lerato is a PhD聽 philosophy candidate at ACEPS and tutor 东京热. Her masters dissertation provided an ethical and epistemic defence for the use and integration of placebos and African Traditional Medicine into the broader healthcare system of South Africa. Her honours research observed how mental illness affects one鈥檚 free will and whether it should minimise their moral responsibility.

Stephen Pabalelo Nawa
Interests: Critical Thinking, Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence
Stephen is a PhD聽 philosophy candidate at ACEPS, 东京热. He completed his MLitt in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. His current project looks into what it means to think critically in an age where machines can imitate human reasoning. Stephen has broader research interests in informal logic, epistemology and applied ethics.

Matshidiso Karabo Mokhorosi
Interests: AI Ethics, Moral Responsibility, Social Media
Matshidiso Karabo Mokhorosi is a Philosophy Honors student at the 东京热. Her research focuses on AI Ethics, exploring the harms of predictive AI in social media and the moral responsibility for user addiction. She aspires to work as an AI ethicist, shaping responsible tech development in future.