Inaugural Lecture by Professor Tanja Bosch

The University of Cape Town (UCT) will host an inaugural lecture by Professor Tanja Bosch as part of the UCT Inaugural Lecture series on Wednesday, 29 July 2026 at 18:00 SAST in the Mafeje Room, Bremner Building, middle campus. Read more about this and other recent developments on campus.

Professor Tanja Bosch, National Research Foundation (NRF) SARChI Chair in Digital Media Sociology and professor of Media Studies and Production in the Centre for Film and Media Studies, will present their inaugural lecture on Wednesday, 29 July 2026.

Titled “Calibrated intimacies: Apps and decolonial refusal", the lecture traces nearly two decades of research into how digital power is exercised through ordinary, intimate and mobile practices. Moving from early work on MXit and Facebook to more recent scholarship on social media, platform power and app cultures, Professor Bosch will explore how platforms function not simply as technologies that mediate communication, but as affective infrastructures that shape feeling, visibility and participation.

The lecture examines everyday digital life, the soft power of apps and digital citizenship as a relational and uneven practice before turning to refusal and decoloniality as methods for understanding and challenging contemporary digital systems. It will include a screening of the experimental film Coastal, Interrupted; and will be accompanied by RIP MacBook Neo, a conceptual installation exploring platform mortality.

Professor Bosch’s research spans digital culture, social media activism, platform power, digital citizenship, generative artificial intelligence and decolonial approaches to media studies. They chair the African Digital Rights Network and serve in several international scholarly leadership roles. They are the author and editor of numerous influential books and publications on media, politics and digital life in Africa.

Register to attend this lecture.