I'm delighted to share some news that feels like a genuine milestone in this research journey: I have been formally affiliated with the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Kenyatta University, Nairobi, for a three-year term running from October 2026 to September 2029.

This comes alongside my existing position as a Research Associate at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand — meaning my work now sits, quite literally, across two countries and two universities, in conversation with each other.

Why Kenyatta, and Why Now

The affiliation was made possible by the generous sponsorship of Professor Philomena Mwaura, whose own scholarship in African Christianity, gender, and theology has long been a point of real intellectual kinship with my own. Under this affiliation, I'll be developing a research project titled Embodied Presence, Sacred Geometry, and African Theological Anthropology: Re-Proportioning Human Identity in the Digital Age.

The project asks a question I think matters more by the day: what do African theological traditions — with their deep commitments to embodied presence, communal identity, and relational personhood — have to say to a world increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence and digital abstraction? 

Drawing on Ujamaa-inspired contextual hermeneutics and the same sacred geometric traditions running through my other current work, this project aims to bring African theological anthropology directly into global conversations about digital ethics, rather than leaving that conversation to be had elsewhere and imported afterward.

How This Connects to the Work at Wits

This isn't a separate thread so much as a second, complementary strand of the same rope. At WiCDS, my three-year programme is developing Critical Geometric Literacy — extending Critical Diversity Literacy into the study of sacred geometry, symbolic cognition, and epistemic power. The Kenyatta project shares that same theoretical DNA, but roots it explicitly in African contextual theology and puts it into direct dialogue with questions of AI, digital colonialism, and technological ethics.

Two universities, two research cultures, one continuous line of thought — I find that genuinely exciting rather than fragmenting, and I hope the work that comes out of it will show why.

What's Next

Over the coming months, my priority is to keep the existing publication pipeline moving — including, I hope, an advance contract on my synthesis monograph, Transdiasporic Lament and the Revelationary Spirit, currently under peer review with the University of Illinois Press — before turning fully to the first outputs of both the Wits and Kenyatta programmes in 2027.

I'm deeply grateful to both Professor Nicky Falkof at WiCDS and Professor Philomena Mwaura at Kenyatta for the confidence they've placed in this work. It's a genuine privilege to be building something across these two institutions, and I look forward to sharing what emerges as the research develops.

Mark Edward Chard is a Research Associate at the Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, and an Affiliated Researcher in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Kenyatta University.

As ever,

Mark