Prof Ngwenyama receives AIS Fellow Award

The School of IT’s Prof Ojelanki Ngwenyama has been honoured with the Association for Information System’s (AIS) annual Fellow Award.

An Emeritus Professor and a senior scholar in the Department of Information Systems, and a member of the Academy of Science of South Africa; Prof Ngwenyama was born in British Guiana in 1953 and grew up in New Amsterdam. He was a Visiting Professor at University of Pretoria from 1993-2001. In 2009 he received D.Phil (Honoris Causa) from the Faculty of Engineering, University of Pretoria for International Contributions to Research Methods in Information Systems.

Prof Ngwenyama earned his PhD (Computer Science, 1988) from Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering, SUNY-Binghamton, under the supervision of two leading scholars Prof Heinz K. Klein and Prof Stephen David Ross (Philosophy). He has published more than 85 research articles in top journals, and supervised more than 30 PhD students in North America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.

By the mid 1990’s, Prof Ngwenyama had attained a world-wide reputation for his scholarship, which focused on understanding how digital technologies are transforming our organizations and societies. Prof Ngwenyama's pioneering research drew on philosophy of science, critical sociology and political economy to develop approaches for critical inquiry into the social aspects of digitalization and for developing methods for values inclusive decision making about IS design and adoption. In “The Critical Social Theory Approach to Information Systems: Problems and Challenges” (1991) he outlined a humanistic critical research program and inquiry methods to broaden the focus of IS research to include norms of justice and human freedoms. This seminal paper set the theoretical foundations adopted by a broad range of critical research IS programs. Prof Ngwenyama’s current research focuses on the social values dilemmas of the digital risk society.  For more details on his research see:

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=nRC94VIAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao