Introduction to AI. Humanities. Social Sciences

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This module orients fellows to the intellectual landscape where AI, humanities, and social sciences intersect, clarifying key concepts, histories, and tensions across these fields. It introduces AI as a socio‑technical system shaped by power, labour, and culture, and contrasts dominant narratives of innovation with critical perspectives from African and Global South scholarship. Fellows will map their own disciplinary backgrounds and research interests to AI‑related questions, begin to articulate their positionality, and explore why humanistic and social inquiry is essential for understanding and governing AI systems.

Data Governance, Digital Sovereignty & AI Ethics: African Regulatory Frameworks

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This topic explores how data governance, digital sovereignty, and AI ethics are being defined and contested within African contexts, with special attention to emerging regulatory frameworks, policies, and regional initiatives. Fellows will examine how data moves across borders, whose interests are privileged in current governance regimes, and what digital sovereignty means for African states, communities, and research institutions. Through case studies of data protection laws, AI strategies, and sector‑specific regulations, they will analyse ethical dilemmas around consent, surveillance, bias, and accountability and consider how humanistic and social science perspectives can inform more just and context‑sensitive regulatory approaches.

AI, Disinformation, and Digital Democracy

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This module investigates how AI systems and digital platforms enable, accelerate, or counter disinformation and what this means for democratic processes, particularly in African and other Global South democracies. Fellows will study the socio‑technical dynamics of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda, including the role of automated accounts, generative AI content, recommendation algorithms, and platform governance. They will engage with real‑world election and civic participation case studies, explore methodological tools for studying information ecosystems, and consider interventions—from policy and regulation to media literacy and public interest technologies—that can strengthen democratic resilience.

Machine Learning and Generative AI Fundamentals

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This topic provides a grounded introduction to key concepts in machine learning and generative AI tailored for humanities and social science researchers, emphasizing understanding over heavy mathematics. Fellows will learn how models are trained, evaluated, and deployed; how common architectures (such as classification models and generative models) work in practice; and where their limitations and biases emerge. Using small, illustrative datasets and accessible tools, they will experiment with building or using simple models, reflect on issues like overfitting and fairness, and develop critical literacy to evaluate claims about AI systems relevant to their own research questions.

Fundamentals of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and African Languages

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This module focuses on natural language processing and language technologies for African languages, highlighting both technical approaches and broader questions of language justice, representation, and cultural preservation. Fellows will be introduced to core NLP tasks such as classification, translation, and language modeling, and examine how resource constraints, data scarcity, and colonial histories shape which languages are well‑served by AI tools. Through hands‑on exploration of existing models, datasets, and platforms, they will learn how to evaluate performance for specific African languages, identify biases and gaps, and imagine research or advocacy projects that support more inclusive, community‑centered language technologies. 

AI + Literary, Creative, and Digital Humanities

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This topic explores how AI can be used both as an analytical instrument and as a creative collaborator within literary studies, the arts, and digital humanities. Fellows will encounter methods for computational text analysis, generative writing and image‑making, and interactive or multimodal storytelling, while also engaging with critical debates about authorship, originality, aesthetics, and cultural memory. They will examine examples from Black and African digital humanities, experiment with creative or interpretive projects using accessible AI tools, and reflect on how these practices can challenge or reinforce existing power structures in cultural production.

AI + Education and Learning Technologies

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This module examines how AI is being embedded in educational systems and learning technologies, from adaptive learning platforms and automated feedback tools to institutional decision‑making and resource allocation. Fellows will analyze these systems through critical lenses such as equity, accessibility, surveillance, and labour, paying attention to how AI transforms the experiences of students, teachers, and administrators in African educational contexts. They will learn frameworks for evaluating AI‑enabled educational tools, explore qualitative and quantitative approaches to studying EdTech in real settings, and consider how to design or advocate for more just, context‑sensitive learning technologies.

AI and Synthetic Research Methods

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This topic introduces synthetic research methods that leverage AI to generate or transform research materials—such as simulated data, synthetic interviews, or AI‑assisted coding and analysis—while interrogating their epistemic and ethical implications. Fellows will explore how these methods can expand research possibilities in data‑scarce or sensitive contexts, but also how they might obscure harms, reproduce biases, or distance researchers from participants and communities. Through guided examples, they will learn to distinguish between responsible augmentation of existing methods and practices that undermine rigor, transparency, or accountability, and develop criteria for when (and how) to appropriately use synthetic approaches in their work.

AI, Health, and the Humanities

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This module looks at how AI is reshaping health and healthcare—through diagnostics, triage tools, public health surveillance, and more—from a humanities and social sciences perspective. Fellows will examine how AI intersects with histories of medicine, ethics of care, disability and illness narratives, and structural inequalities in health systems, especially in African and low‑resource settings. They will analyze case studies of AI in clinical, community, and public health contexts, engage with patient and practitioner perspectives, and consider how humanistic and social inquiry can inform more equitable, culturally attuned health technologies and policies.

AI and Cultural Heritage Preservation

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This topic explores how AI is being used to document, preserve, and reimagine cultural heritage, including archives, museums, oral traditions, and intangible cultural practices. Fellows will learn about digitisation efforts, restoration and reconstruction tools, and classification and recommendation systems, while analyzing who decides what is preserved, how it is described, and for whom. They will consider issues of ownership, consent, and community control in heritage projects, explore examples where AI supports indigenous or local knowledge systems, and critically assess where such technologies risk extraction, misrepresentation, or loss of context.

AI + Climate & Environmental Sustainability

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: AI + Climate & Environmental Sustainability explores how AI tools are being used to understand and respond to environmental challenges in African contexts, from climate adaptation and mitigation to agriculture, energy, and conservation. It looks at specific applications like forecasting, early‑warning systems, and resource monitoring, while also interrogating AI’s own environmental footprint and whose priorities are encoded in these systems. Fellows consider how humanities and social science perspectives can shape more just, locally grounded, and sustainable AI‑driven environmental interventions. 

Practical AI Tools for Humanities Researchers

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This workshop series introduces fellows to practical AI‑enabled tools that can support different stages of humanities and social science research, from literature review and note‑taking to transcription, coding, analysis, and dissemination. Emphasis will be on low‑barrier, accessible tools that can work in constrained institutional environments, with guided exercises that integrate these tools into fellows’ own ongoing projects. Alongside demonstrations, the workshops will foreground critical questions about data privacy, intellectual labour, and dependency on proprietary platforms, helping fellows to adopt tools strategically and sustainably rather than uncritically.

Science Communication, Research Translation & Policy Engagement

Facilitator: TBD

Focus: This workshop focuses on how to translate AI‑related humanities and social science research into accessible formats and interventions that can engage wider publics and inform policy. Fellows will learn practical strategies for writing op‑eds and policy briefs, designing public‑facing explainers, and collaborating with media, civil society, and decision‑makers. They will also explore models of co‑production and participatory engagement, practice tailoring their messages to different audiences, and develop plans for how their fellowship projects can live beyond the programme as part of ongoing public and policy conversations.