July 29, 2022
The Institute for Contemporary Ethics (ICE) launches!
On Friday, 29 July, the Institute for Contemporary Ethics (ICE), associated with the School of Philosophy, was launched. The launch was attended by the Chair, the Steering Committee, Prof. Mirna Nel – the Deputy Dean of Research and Innovation, and Prof. Nnenesi Kgabi – Director of Research Support, on behalf of the Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation.
Prof. Tapiwa Chagonda, the Director of the Centre for Data Ethics (CDE) at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), gave the keynote address, emphasising the crucial need for the Humanities to engage with the ethics of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Whereas the CDE and other similar institutes in South Africa are driven by questions of opacity, accountability and the exclusivity of algorithmic processes and data mining and usage, ICE distinguishes itself by addressing posthuman ethical questions, such as the ecological crisis and its co-imbrication with society and technology. This includes, for example, the carbon footprint of server farms and the environmental destruction brought about by cobalt extraction. These practices highlight not only the potential negative consequences of human-technology-environment entanglements, but also the need for addressing these in terms of global South specific frameworks. To this end, ICE’s mission is to find more ethical ways to live meaningful, just lives by establishing a hub for trans- and interdisciplinary research.
Our First Director:
Prof. Chantelle Gray co-founded the Institute for Contemporary Ethics (ICE) with Prof. Anné Verhoef and served as the first Director from 2022–2024. Her research focuses on politics and the digital condition, with the aim of developing frameworks of care that make possible meaningful futures for humans and the more-than-human world.
Her books include Deleuze and Anarchism, coedited by Aragorn Eloff (2019, Edinburgh University Press) and Anarchism after Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures (2022, Bloomsbury).
Under Chantelle’s leadership, ICE distinguished itself as a hub for trans- and interdisciplinary research addressing ethical questions related to sociopolitical, environmental and technological ecologies through the development of global South specific concepts and theoretical paradigms.
In this time, ICE hosted Prof. Janae Sholtz, a Fulbright Specialist and visiting Professor from Alvernia University, and the author of The Invention of a People: Heidegger and Deleuze on Art and the Political (2015, Edinburgh University Press).
Together, Chantelle and Janae launched a project on “Posthuman Ethics: Reimagining the Art of Living”, which sought to address the unprecedented perturbations emanating from the advancements in digital and other technologies, and the effects of these on ideas and practices related to what Socrates called “the good life.”