Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW) Launches
Max Planck Society has launched two Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centres. The launch includes the Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW), a cooperation between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.
The Max Planck–NTU Singapore Centre for Biocultural Worlding (CBCW) is a new joint research initiative between the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin, Germany and NTU Centre for Contemporary Art (NTU-CCA) in Singapore (2026–2031). It brings together researchers, artists, curators, legal scholars, and knowledge-holding communities to engage with some of the most pressing questions of our time: how biological diversity and cultural life are profoundly entangled, how that entanglement shapes planetary futures, and what forms of knowledge practice are needed to understand and respond to these realities.
The Centre is co-directed by Dagmar Schäfer (MPIWG) and Ute Meta Bauer (NTU-CCA) and co-deputy directed by Lisa Onaga (MPIWG) and Saidul Islam (NTU).
(left to right) NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore director Professor Ute Meta Bauer; Director, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Professor Dagmar Schäfer; NTU Chair of the School of Social Sciences Professor Yohanes Eko Riyanto; NTU Vice President (International Engagement) Professor Lee Pooi See; President of Max Planck Society Professor Patrick Cramer; German Ambassador to Singapore Dr Bettina Fanghänel; Chairman of the National Research Foundation, Singapore, Mr Heng Swee Keat; Chairperson of the NTU Board of Trustees, Ms Goh Swee Chen; NTU Deputy President and Provost Professor Christian Wolfrum; Director, Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Surfaces Professor Peter Seeberger; NUS Vice President (Industry) Professor Ursula Oesterle; A*STAR Executive Director, Institute of Materials Research and Engineering, Professor Loh Xian Jun; and NTU Distinguished University Professor Chen Xiaodong.
Source: NTU Singapore
A New Institutional Model
CBCW is conceived as an institutional model for challenging the analytical separation between nature and culture and for reflecting on its consequences. The complex questions that animate its work motivate research that requires strategies beyond singular disciplinary or institutional framings that often fail to address the epistemic, ethical, and political dimensions of these issues simultaneously. CBCW is founded on the premise that a capacity to think rigorously across multiple disciplines, approaches, and epistemologies is a necessary condition from which new and deeper forms of inquiry can emerge.
What is Biocultural Worlding?
Biocultural worlding describes the active, plural, and ongoing processes through which human and non-human beings draw on entangled biological and cultural knowledges to collectively shape planetary futures with care, equity, and epistemic humility. At CBCW, biocultural worlding is simultaneously the object of inquiry and the aspiration for how the Centre itself operates: producing knowledge about the world through genuinely pluralized, accountable, and relational practices, across all the disciplines, traditions, and communities it brings together.
Roundtable Conversation: Biocultural Methods for Future Pasts. Moderated by CBCW Co-Deputy Director Dr. Lisa Onaga (left), Novi Asti Lalasati, Firdaus Sani, Veronica Renner, Michael Stanley-Baker
Source: Ute Meta Bauer