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.
CBCW is conceived as an institutional model for challenging the analytical separation between nature and culture and for reflecting on its consequences far beyond academia. 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.
