Advances in molecular biology led to the use of molecular methods to identify patterns of genetic variation at the DNA level. This enabled a more robust assessment of the patterns of genetic variation at the individual level that contribute to the study of the genetic affinities of human populations around the world. This paper focuses on how genetic variation among sub-Saharan African populations has contributed to advancing our understanding of population history in Africa and human evolution and discusses ethical issues related to conducting research on human subjects. Using mitochondrial DNA (in both women and men) and Y-chromosome DNA (men only), it is possible to trace an individual’s maternal and paternal lineage ancestry, respectively. Public curiosity about its ancestry sparked interest in genetic ancestry testing services and population genetic research, thus contributing to public participation in science.

I focus on multi-purpose batch chemical plants in industry, complex batch processes in edible oil processing, and pesticide production. Batch chemical processes are characterized by discontinuous operations and the critical role of time. My contributions include development of a graphical water optimization method in batch plants and the state-sequence-network (SSN) approach for scheduling, thereby reducing the complexity of mathematical models used in batch process optimization. The developed method extends to heat integration, leading to a new operational philosophy in batch chemical plants – process intermediate storage. A pivotal moment came when my PhD student, E. R. Seid, discovered a flaw in my mathematical formulation premised on a SSN, which resulted in a more robust framework, and a method to predict the optimal number of time points in scheduling problems. I emphasize the recognition of knowledge gaps, industry collaboration, and an interdisciplinary approach to drive innovation and highlight how conscious awareness of the unknown, the ‘black cat in the dark room’, is crucial for advancing scientific knowledge. Ignorance is at the heart of breakthroughs in science engineering.

The production of knowledge in public health involves a systematic approach that combines imagination, science, and social justice, based on context, rigorous data collection, analysis, and interpretation to improve health outcomes and save lives. Based on a comprehensive understanding of health trends and risk factors in populations, research priorities are established. Rigorous study design and analysis are critical to establish causal relationships, ensuring that robust evidence-based interventions guide beneficial health policies and practice. Communication through peer-reviewed publications, community outreach, and stakeholder engagement ensures that insights are co-owned by potential beneficiaries. Continuous monitoring and feedback loops are vital to adapt strategies based on emerging outcomes. This dynamic process advances public health knowledge and enables effective interventions. The process of addressing a complex challenge of preventing HIV infection in young women in sub-Saharan Africa, a demographic with the least social power but the highest HIV risk, highlights the importance of inclusion in knowledge generation, enabling social change through impactful science.

This narrative explores my journey through music performance and scholarship in the context of apartheid South Africa. It begins with my early music education that led to a crisis while studying Mozart’s A Minor Piano Sonata, highlighting the difference between technical competence and genuine musical understanding. The experience prompted a shift toward a deeper appreciation of musical phrasing, structure, and physical connection to the instrument under the guidance of Marian Friedman, who emphasized the nuances of musical expression and technique. The exploration extends to my academic work in musicology, revealing the performative aspects of scholarship and the dangers of merely imitating academic norms without authentic engagement. The realization catalyzed a pivot toward the study of South African music and the adoption of a decolonial approach, rooted in cultural and geopolitical identity. With new scholarly practices, I emphasize resisting mere performance and prioritizing local culture, risk-taking, and authentic artistic expression. The narrative captures a transition from technical proficiency to holistic and contextually grounded music and scholarship understanding.

The chapter relates to new knowledge created in a specialized area of biotechnology, biocatalysis, where enzymes are used as environmentally benign catalysts for reactions producing valued chemical products or processes. It integrates enzyme discovery with various related fields, including chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, molecular biology, genomics, and engineering. I describe research on various reaction systems and the relevance of new discoveries of novel materials and bioprocesses. New technologies have enabled discovery to take place in an ongoing cycle. Identifying the biological agent, the enzyme, creates new knowledge in biotech processes. Here is where techniques and technologies have evolved through some giant leaps. From an era of sequencing DNA isolated from cultured cells, biocatalyst discovery has moved to current times when next-generation sequencing allows collection and analysis of huge bodies of complex biological data, CRISPR gene editing enables the design and production of novel biological agents, and digital technologies incorporating AI enable creative new ideas; the discovery of new enzymes to use as biocatalysts has even greater scope for progress.

Through a telling of my trajectories as a social historian interested in the histories of whites under apartheid, I assert the value of distance from authorizing effects of major intellectual and historiographic currents and history from the provinces. I draw on theory, methodological, and critical traditions not often employed by South Africanists, Black critical perspectives on racist society, German Alltagsgeschichte, and the historical trend within subaltern studies. This allows notions of ‘the ordinary’ in white society, questioning complicity and addressing these through various methodological and evidentiary entry points. Such historiography can disturb or energize histories of race, specifically whites, helping us to rethink the values, possibilities, and limitations of social history within the broader discipline. While the history of the provinces can be nimble and innovative, it can also become parochial and complacent. To prevent the latter, ‘the provinces’ can neither be a refuge for disengagement nor an excuse for isolation. Rather, they should be seen as a place from which one ventures regularly back to ideally multiple centres, a kind of provincial cosmopolitanism.

This chapter is a reflection on three intellectual moves that tend to be revealing and influential in English-speaking philosophy, set in an autobiographical context. One move is to apply a new method to an issue that has been treated for a long time in other ways. A second is to look for data that are not entailed or adequately explained by existing theories and then to develop a theory that accounts for them while also making sense of data for which existing theories can account. The third is to find an assumption common to two long-standing disputants and advance an alternative to them both that does not rely on it. This essay includes strategic advice for budding philosophers who might want to take such approaches to their work.

This article is based on personal experience in the discipline of architecture that argues for imagination as a driver of new knowledge production, hopefully by describing my academic and practice journey. It is about the practical realization of outcomes rooted in a creative imagination; the tension between reality and fantasy, and synthesizing multiple concerns of a place, creating something meaningful for a place and to the inhabitants. The story of my academic journey is grounded in how I have creatively applied my knowledge of the discipline to explore current social phenomena in the place that has been home for three decades, South Africa. My professional journey driven by a practice that imaginatively, within the particularities of place, has attempted to make visible pathways from which to change beliefs and attitudes that bind me to authoritative knowledge. In the tension between academic and professional journeys, the former biased by what I have learnt and know, and the latter, a creative exploration of imagination, knowledge is not authoritative or alternate. It is a collection of dynamic experiences; collective understandings in different life-worlds. It is new.

This chapter provides the briefest overview of the ‘linguistic method’. It briefly gives an example of a truly ‘Eureka’ moment in the history of linguistics, with the discovery of laryngeals in the ancient Hittite language. The focus is on the pidgin language, Fanakalo of South Africa, a relatively simple means of communication that combined mainly Zulu words with mainly an English-like syntax. Until fairly recently, an oft-repeated claim was that the pidgin was likely to have originated on the plantations of Natal in the mid to late nineteenth century. The hypothesis was that incoming plantation workers from India who spoke a variety of not all mutually intelligible languages had to learn the main languages of the colony, English and Zulu, rapidly and under less-than-ideal conditions. In so doing, they would have – so the hypothesis went – come up with a simple mixture of Zulu and English. I recount how this hypothesis was disproved, first on the grounds of linguistic plausibility and secondly, and more decisively, on the grounds of the archival records, which showed the pidgin to be in existence well before the arrival of indentured Indian workers.

Western approaches to knowledge production in archaeology have primarily been framed on the ‘artefact’ and how the information around it aggregates to the ‘feature’, ‘structure’, ‘site’, and the spatial spread of such evidence in the landscape and its transformation over time. The deep history of Africa shows how this framing of knowledge in non-Western societies has been framed and internalized into ‘prehistory’, seriously impacting the methodology and theory necessary to understand contexts beyond the Global North. I argue here that if approaches to rewriting the African pasts are to effectively challenge this disaggregation and fragmentation of knowledge in archaeology, new knowledge must provide meanings to material culture and contexts that align with the worldviews of Indigenous peoples. Archaeology then becomes a discipline not only focused on the study of the past but also on how the past connects with the present and helps address the contemporary human condition.

In this essay, I will share some of the perspectives that emerged from my recent experience writing a commentary on the book of Jonah (OTL, Westminster John Knox, 2024) that may offer some insight into what knowledge production entails in my field of biblical interpretation. The numerous incongruities, complexities, and uncertainties associated with this enigmatic book have yielded some interesting interpretations, with interpreters returning again and again to these strange aspects of the text to generate new insights into old problems.

Scientific discovery, particularly in disciplines such as physics and biology, often asks if there remains room for truly transformative innovations. But microbiome research faces considerable challenges stemming from the intricacies of microbial communities. These are subject to dynamic processes, such as horizontal gene transfer, and exhibit great variability across different spatial scales. Genomic sequencing and molecular biology removed the constraint of traditional isolation techniques. Microbiome research typically unfolds along two distinct trajectories: exploration and hypothesizing. However, exploratory studies emphasize sequencing entire communities to develop foundational datasets, while hypothesis-driven research adopts a more structured framework aimed at testing specific ecological theories. Merging these approaches, particularly through the integration of emerging technologies such as machine learning, holds significant potential for driving future discoveries. The combination of these methodologies considered may help unravel critical ecosystem services rendered by microbial communities, both within host-associated systems and in broader environmental contexts.