Ralph Borland is an artist, curator and interdisciplinary knowledge worker based in Cape Town, South Africa. His projects African Robots and SPACECRAFT are collaborations with street wire artists in Southern Africa to introduce electronics and mechanics to their practice. Their monumental electro-mechanical music-making spaceship sculpture Dubship I – Black Starliner was launched at the Zeitz MOCAA in 2019. In 2020, Ralph Borland Studio completed two public artworks for the City of Cape Town. Ralph has a degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town, and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University. His PhD from Trinity College Dublin is a critique of first world design interventions in the developing world. His art-design piece Suited for Subversion (2002), a protective and performance suit for street protest, is in the permanent collection of the New York Museum of Modern Art. He co-curated the exhibition FUTUREPRESENT: Design in a Time of Urgency which opened at Science Gallery Detroit in September 2020. Across his work, Ralph pursues an interdisciplinary approach to teasing out issues of power, activism, and social engagement via designed objects, often through collaborative artistic practice. His work plays on the aesthetics of make-do and ad hoc design, and the pleasures of pop culture, using sculpture, found objects, image, sound and music, and interactive media.

Nedine Moonsamy is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literature department at the University of Pretoria. She is currently writing a monograph on contemporary South African Fiction and otherwise conducts research on science fiction in Africa. Her debut novel, The Unfamous Five, is published by Modjaji Books (September 2019).

Divine Fuh is a social anthropologist and Director of HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa, at the University of Cape Town (UCT). His research focuses on the politics of suffering and smiling, particularly examining how African urban youth seek ways of smiling in the midst of their suffering. He has done work in Botswana, Cameroon, Senegal and South Africa. His current research focuses on the political economy of Pan-African knowledge production, and also AI and the ethics of care in Africa. He previously served as Director of Publications and Dissemination Programme at the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). He is Founding Managing Editor of Langaa Research and Publishing, and is currently Co-Chair of the Global Africa Group (GAG) of the World Universities Council (WUN).

Dr. Buhle Khanyile has a PhD from the University of Cape Town in psychology and currently works at the Impact Centre at the Human Sciences Research Council. His areas of interest include Black Existential Philosophy, Critical Race Theory, and Intergroup Relations. His most important publications include: Tortured souls and disposed bodies (Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society); Contact theory and the concept of prejudice; Metaphysical and moral explorations and an epistemological question (Theory and & Psychology); and Interracial contact among university and school youth in post-apartheid South Africa (The Wiley Handbook of Group Processes). For him, this project provides an opportunity to reflect on violence as a theoretical discourse and as a lived experience in the lives of young people in South Africa.