GenAI Think Tank 2026

Think Tank on GenAI and the Question of Knowledge

University of Johannesburg Kerzner Building | 26-27 October 2026

This event brings together researchers investigating GenAI's impact and senior leaders in South Africa's higher education sector for a conversation about knowledge in an age of algorithmic mediation. 

The advent of generative AI (GenAI) presents South African higher education with opportunities and challenges that extend far beyond assessment integrity. While important debates about academic misconduct and plagiarism detection have dominated institutional responses, we risk missing an important issue: the positive and negative implications of GenAI for knowledge itself - its creation, validation, dissemination, and epistemic status. Each of these is a question of critical significance for higher education. The rise of AI brings us face to face with the significance of machine learning and its challenges to our own much messier forms of sense-making, and how we come to evaluate these different ways of thinking.

As a sector committed to the common good, we have both the responsibility and the intellectual resources to lead societal conversations about what GenAI means for concepts such as truth, ‘better knowledge’, democratic participation, and intellectual citizenship. 

This think tank aims to:

• Deepen our understanding of how GenAI (in particular, but not exclusively LLMs) challenges fundamental epistemological questions in higher education

• Engage critically with diverse disciplinary perspectives on knowledge creation in an age of algorithmic mediation

• Ensure our institutional responses to GenAI foreground higher education's public good mandate rather than being driven solely by market pressures or compliance concerns

• Address the 'question of knowledge' that underpins all dimensions of GenAI's impact - from assessment practices to research integrity to democratic participation

• Build collaborative networks for ongoing deliberation about knowledge, truth, and epistemic justice in the age of AI

See the full concept note here.

FIND THE VENUE: Kerzner Building, Bunting Rd Campus, University of Johannesburg

MEET THE SPEAKERS

Abstract

Generative AI systems increasingly participate in all stages of the knowledge creation lifecycle. In fact, AI systems with agentic capabilities may see participation not only in terms of producing final text, but also in formulating hypotheses, proposing experiments, or analysis of data. I flag two core ethical concerns in this context. Firstly, I advocate for a critical re-examination of what constitutes knowledge in the genAI context, because I argue for reconsidering who benefits, who bears the risks, who can be held accountable, and who are marginalised or exploited in the ‘knowledge project’. Secondly, I flag the issue of political power, not new to philosophy of science or epistemology debates, rearing its head in a new way. I discuss this issue in the context of digital epistemicide, which is the systematic erasure, silencing, or devaluing of a community's knowledge systems, history, and culture through digital means. The potential for this exists because large language models are for the most part trained on minority world content, which means that epistemic voices in the majority world may potentially be silenced. Now more than ever, human epistemic role players in the majority world are in danger of being excluded from contributing to their own and other societies as they are blocked from epistemic collaboration and negotiation, while at the same time, their behavioral data is extracted as free for the taking by global technology companies. I warn that a failure to engage with a critical rethinking of the status of knowledge as a deeply political and ethical endeavour might very well result in cementing the current world-order into place with dire consequences for human civilisation and progress.  

Bio

Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem is a philosopher of science and technology, an AI ethics policy advisor, and a machine ethics researcher. Currently at UP, she is the UNESCO Chair in AI for Community Resilience, Head of the Department of Philosophy, and a senior faculty fellow of the African Institute for Data Science and AI. Emma also leads the AI ethics group at the South African Centre for AI Research (CAIR). She is the current Chairperson of the UNESCO World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology (COMEST), a member of UNESCO’s AI Ethics Experts without Borders Network, and joined the WEF’s Global Future Council on Autonomous Systems in 2025. She has been a member of the Global Academic Network, Centre for AI and Digital Policy, Washington DC since 2023, and has worked on AI governance projects with the African Union Development Agency and the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights. She is a scientific advisor for the African Centre for AI, and a member of the international advisory board at the Global Centre on AI Governance.  

Abstract forthcoming

Bio

Jantina de Vries is founding and current director of the Ethics Lab and Professor of Medicine at the University of Cape Town (UCT). She works in the field of ethics, and is especially interested in the ethics of new and emerging health technologies in AI, genomics and neuroscience. She is also very interested to understand better how ideas and experiences from the African continent can and should inform our ethics. This is the work that the EthicsLab tries to foster.

Jantina was a member of the WHO Genome Editing Expert Advisory Committee, a member of the H3Africa Steering Committee and the founding Chair of the H3Africa Working Group on Ethics. She led the development of many ethics guidelines for genomics research that are used across the African continent. She is a member of the Ethics Board of Médecins Sans Frontières and the Steering Committee of the Global Forum for Bioethics in Research. She currently is helping establish the UCT AI Initiative.

Jantina obtained her DPhil through The Ethox Centre at the University of Oxford (2011), and an undergraduate degree in sociology at Wageningen University (2003). She has published over 150 articles in international peer reviewed journals.

Abstract

Rather than treating GenAI-driven publishing misconduct as a crisis of individual ethics, I argue it is a rational response to a metrics-driven academic economy, one that funding formulas and ranking systems help sustain. A more rounded 'public good mandate' for GenAI in Higher Education has to review the wider choice architecture, not just police conduct after the fact. What possibilities come into view for GenAI when academics and students work to build a public good mandate?

Bio

Scott Timcke is a political theorist whose research examines the relationship between capitalism, technology, democracy, and state power to analyse the historical development and contemporary contradictions in the North and South Atlantic. He holds a PhD from Simon Fraser University and has held appointments at The University of the West Indies, Research ICT Africa and the Centre for Social Change at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). 

He is the author of several books, including Algorithms and the End of Politics, and is currently completing a manuscript on capitalist AI and its implications for democratic and authoritarian forms of government. 

His research focuses on class formation, state formation, the rule of law, and the dynamics of advanced capitalism, with particular attention to how technical change reshapes institutions, social relations, and political possibilities. Through a critical, historical lens, his scholarship seeks to clarify the conditions under which democratic life can flourish. 

Abstract

This paper undertakes the first sustained engagement, from the vantage point of the humanities, the social sciences and decolonial theory, with the paired oeuvre of two of Africa's most prolific engineer-intellectuals: Tshilidzi Marwala and Arthur G. O. Mutambara. Both are world-class control-systems and artificial intelligence (AI) engineers who have become the most influential African advocates of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) and AI, and who together made the University of Johannesburg a continental headquarters for the embrace of computational technologies. Their contributions are read closely and taken seriously before being weighed. The organising thesis is that for every technology there is a cosmology as its discursive context, and the argument is woven around a diagnostic triad of technolatry, technophilia and technophobia. I argue that the 4IR/AI advocacy of these scholars, notwithstanding its Afro-affirmative intent, tends towards a technolatry that reifies technology as culturally neutral, misreads the coloniality of time as a developmental 'gap', and brackets both the political economy of data colonialism and the epistemic freight of what I have elsewhere called the cognitive empire. The paper then turns this framework directly upon generative AI and the question of knowledge in South African higher education, addressing the sector's public good mandate, epistemological differentiation across disciplines, the commodification of academic publishing, the erosion of epistemic authority, and algorithmic bias against the Global South. The withdrawal in April 2026 of South Africa's own Draft National Artificial Intelligence Policy, after fabricated references were found in its bibliography, is read as an emblematic episode. The University of Johannesburg is offered as an extended case study of an institution caught between the decolonial turn and the 4IR turn. Building on the insurgent traditions of postcolonial, decolonial and Black digital humanities, the paper proposes a decolonial third position beyond the binary of technophilia and technophobia, predicated on the domestication of technology within African ecologies of knowledges and a pluriversal cosmology of relationality. At the constructive centre of the paper stands a synthesis grid that reads the material layers of the 4IR/AI stack namely energy, infrastructure, chips, large language models and applications through the analytical modalities of coloniality consisting of such units of analysis as being, power, knowledge, gender, nature, spirituality and aesthetics in order to hold the two streams together in a single ecology of knowledges in the service of humanity rather than as opposed camps. Its central claim is that decoloniality and technological advancement are not sequential tasks but simultaneous ones, and that Africa needs neither to worship nor to fear the machine, but to re-world it.

Bio

Prof Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni is a historian and decolonial/postcolonial theorist. He is currently Professor of History and Canada Research Chair (CRC) Tier 1 in Pluralistic Societies: Epistemic Pluralism and Ecologies of Knowledges at the University of Calgary, Canada. In addition, Prof Ndlovu-Gatsheni holds several professorships including Professor Extraordinarius in the Department of Leadership and Transformation (DLT) at UNISA; Professor Extraordinarius at the Centre for Gender and African Studies at UFS; Honorary Professor in the School of Education (Education & Development Studies) at UKZN; Visiting Research Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (JIAS) at UJ; and is also a Research Associate of The Ferguson Centre for African and Asian Studies at The Open University in the United Kingdom. Prof Ndlovu-Gatsheni is founding Head of the Archie Mafeje Research Institute for Applied Social Policy (AMRI) and the founder of the Africa Decolonial Research Network (ADERN), both at UNISA, and is a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). 

His field of work includes decolonial/postcolonial theory, empire & colonialism, politics of knowledge & decolonisation of higher education, and he has fieldwork and archival experience in South Africa and Zimbabwe. Professor Ndlovu-Gatsheni has over a hundred publications to his name, which bear testimony to his global scholarly influence. 

Abstract

This presentation considers GenAI as a knowledge-governance challenge rather than only an assessment or misconduct issue. It asks whose knowledge is embedded in AI systems, whose knowledge is rendered invisible, and what responsibilities South African universities have in protecting, validating and advancing African scholarship in an AI-mediated knowledge economy. Drawing on intellectual property, innovation and development perspectives, the presentation argues for institutional responses that foreground epistemic justice, public-good obligations and the distinctive needs of Global South knowledge communities.

Bio

Prof Caroline B. Ncube is a Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Cape Town (UCT) where she holds the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation (DST&I) – National Research Foundation Research (NRF) SARChI Chair in Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development. 

Prof Ncube holds a NRF B2 rating and is a Member of the Academy of Science of South Africa (ASSAf). Since 2023, she is the recipient of a UCT Excellence Award for Professors. In 2024, she received the South African Women in Science Awards (SAWISA) Distinguished Woman Researcher (Humanities and Social Sciences) award. 

She lectured on the WIPO-ARIPO-Africa University Masters Degree in IP (2012 – 2022) and is an Associate Member of the Centre for Law, Technology and Society, University of Ottawa. She is a member of the African Continental Free Trade Area Trade and Industrial Development Advisory Council and several other continental advisory boards. She is a co-leader of the Open African Innovation Research (OpenAIR) partnership and participates in several other research projects.  

Abstract

This talk approaches this discussion of generative AI in universities as an effort to widen the ethical agenda, encompassing questions of plagiarism, authenticity and appropriate use alongside questions of knowledge, power, political economy and epistemic justice. This broader agenda invites a correspondingly expansive account of ethical practice beyond the specification of principles or the judgement of w hether particular uses are right or wrong. In response, I develop and articulate ethics as a practice of critical attention examining how a field of concern is organised, what becomes morally and politically salient, which actors and relationships come into view, where responsibility is located, and what recedes from view. Drawing on prevailing narratives about Africa’s AI future, I explore how stories help organise this field of concern and what this means for how universities think ethically about generative AI.

Bio

Anye-Nkwenti Nyamnjoh is a senior research officer at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, where he coordinates the EthicsLab’s research development program. 

His work sits at the intersection of African political thought, ethics and emerging technologies, and his scholarship contributes to debates on decolonisation as an ethical, intellectual and political project. His research has explored how questions of knowledge, identity and belonging are articulated and contested within African political and intellectual traditions, and how these dynamics shape ethical and political claims about justice both past and present. He is particularly interested in how African thought is leveraged in contemporary debates on AI ethics. 

MEET THE FACILITATORS

Sioux McKenna is Professor of Higher Education Research at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her interests include what knowledge is legitimised by the academy and what is not, and who gets to access this knowledge and who does not. She currently undertakes research on the university rankings industry, the academic publishing industry, and the implications of artificial intelligence for higher education's role as a public good. 

Prof McKenna manages several EU-funded international projects, focused on democracy, doctoral education and the nature of knowledge. She also leads two national projects, including the DHET UCDG-funded Enhancing Postgraduate Education project, of which this Think Tank is part. She is also the lead of an ASSAf Consensus Study on the implications of GenAI for Knowledge.

Prof Shireen Motala is the DHET/NRF South African Research Chair: Teaching and Learning (PSET) in the Faculty of Education at the University of Johannesburg (UJ) where she also served as Head of the Postgraduate School. She is a member of the Academy of Science in South Africa (ASSAf).

Prof Motala has held numerous leadership roles related to higher education including Chairperson of the Education Policy Consortium (2006-2010), Chairperson of the UNESCO South African Commission (2001-2006) and first inaugural president of the South African Research Association (SAERA) (2013-2014). She was appointed by the Minster of Higher Education and Training to serve on the Council of Higher Education (CHE) for two terms from 2010-2018. In 2013, she served on the Ministerial Committee to review the national Senior Certificate examination. She is currently a trustee at the South African Institute for Distance Education. She is on the Assessment and Accreditation committee of UMALUSI-the Council for quality Assurance in General and Further Education and Training.

An NRF rated researcher, Prof. Motala has initiated collaborations between universities across Africa and with Asian and European institutions which have led to the formation of long-term regional and international partnerships. As a leader in research, she was the principal investigator for the international Consortium for Research on Equity, Access and Transitions in Education (CREATE).