Professor Bronwen Morgan returns from the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies Fellowship, South Africa

Hub Member Professor Bronwen Morgan spent a very productive three months in South Africa as a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies between February and April 2023. She was one of 20 scholars hosted by the Institute during this period, with the cohort hailing from the full span of disciplines from literature to nano-science, and from all across the globe from Oman to Burundi.

Set amongst mountains and substantial native gardens (including their own vineyard which produces Institute-branded wine), the Fellows interacted over regular meals, seminars and reading groups with little to disturb the focus on learning and intellectual exchange beyond occasional fieldtrips exploring the history and setting of key aspects of South Africa’s Western Cape. While at the Institute, Professor Morgan completed three chapters of a book that is under consideration with Bristol University Press that is tentatively titled Regenerating the Sharing Economy. The book explores themes and trajectories that have emerged from Professor Morgan’s ARC Future Fellowship Research between 2012 and 2016 as well as follow up research funded by the Allens Hub.

The book looks back at a period just before the term ‘sharing economy’ became ubiquitous, in the early 2010s, and the way in which the phrase first seemed to capture a pluriverse of positive possibilities for rewiring the economic, social and environmental aspects of our collective lives. It traces the arc of institutional change that saw ‘the sharing economy’ come to mean something much narrower, extractive and bleakly familiar – something captured in part by the ‘gig economy’ and in part by a pervasive spread of platform dynamics and digital control over ever-wider swathes of our collective lives. Yet at the same time, the book highlights the ways in which the shifting techtonics of political and economic change have made the earlier impulses for that pluriverse ever more relevant: impulses that in the current moment are being voiced as movements for regenerative economies.

Professor Morgan’s writing and research benefited greatly from the interdisciplinary conversations made possible by the Fellowship, which interestingly focused much more on questions of inequality and political participation than on the opportunities or constraints of digitalisation. This was the case both within the Institute of Advanced Studies and at the nearby Sustainability Institute where Professor Morgan taught a class to Masters students from across the globe. Overall, technology seemed to be associated more with science and technical innovation and viewed somewhat separately from social and political questions, though ethical issues and systems change approaches both provided a productive bridge at times.

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