Ralph Borland: Pursuing an idea. The unfolding of a PhD project

HUMA Doctoral Seminar Series

Speaker: Ralph Borland (HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town, South Africa)

In this seminar, Ralph Borland uses his experience of pursuing a PhD to reflect on how we move from an idea to a completed thesis. His doctoral work 'Radical Plumbers and PlayPumps – Objects in development' (2011) is a critical examination of 'design for the developing world' which draws widely across disciplines: interventionist art, critical design, appropriate technology, science and technology studies, and object studies. As an artist from Southern Africa working on a highly interdisciplinary project in an engineering department at Trinity College in Dublin, starting with some of the ideas from his Master's work at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, Ralph had both the benefits and challenges of an open field to work in for his PhD project. He will discuss some of the processes that helped him define his argument and structure his research to produce his written thesis. For more information, please see https://objectsindevelopment.net/phd-thesis/

About the speaker: Ralph Borland is a Junior Research Fellow at HUMA – Institute for Humanities in Africa, University of Cape Town, South Africa. Ralph Borland is a researcher at HUMA, and an artist, curator and interdisciplinary knowledge worker. He has a degree in Fine Art from the University of Cape Town and a Master 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 post-doctoral work at UCT focused on the African city and North-South knowledge inequalities. He has a keen interest in the democratisation and creative use of emerging technologies; African Robots, his collaboration with street wire artists in Southern Africa, introduces electronics and mechanics to their practice. His art-design piece Suited for Subversion (2002), a protective and performance suit for street protest, is in the New York Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection. He co-curated the exhibitions Design and Violence at Science Gallery Dublin in 2016 and Future Present: Design in a Time of Urgency at Science Gallery Detroit in 2020. He is a selected artist on the Dakar Biennale 2022.