Keynote Lectures: What is "Worlding" in Biocultural Worlding?

Centered around the theme of Biocultural Worlding, these keynote lectures will explore the processes that shape our understanding of the world through the deep interconnections between cultural and biological life. Dr Lisa Onaga, Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, will reflect on the intersections of biological materiality, cultural practice, and the authorship of knowledge. Curator and researcher Dr Margarida Mendes will explore the concept of worlding from the ocean point of view. This lecture foregrounds ecosystemic, political and ontological relations across aquatic realms. It introduces ongoing research and activism on ecoacoustics, deep sea mining, and remote sensing, proposing how different modes of ocean monitoring may contribute to plural oceanic worldings and alliances in the making. Together, their lectures will illuminate how Biocultural Worlding unfolds across land and sea, and how attending to these entanglements opens new ways of imagining collective futures in times of environmental and epistemic loss.

22nd September 2025, 6:30pm – 8:00pm

The Hall, NTU CCA, Blk 6 Lock Road, #01-10 Gillman Barracks, Singapore 108934

Image credit: Liang Shaoji, Lonely Cloud, 2016, multimedia installation, detail, Trees of Life – Knowledge in Material (2018), NTU CCA Singapore. Courtesy NTU CCA Singapore.

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Speaker Bios

Lisa Onaga is a Senior Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and previously Assistant Professor of History, School of Humanities at NTU, Singapore. Her research addresses questions related to the ownership and authorship of knowledge connected to biological materiality at the interface of invertebrate and human life in agricultural, laboratory, and industrial settings, especially in Japan. She has a forthcoming monograph, Cocoon Cultures: The Entangled History of Biology and Silk in Japan Since 1840. Her most recent project includes “Biomaterial Matters,” examining a suite of multidisciplinary postwar histories of silk as a biomaterial, focusing on how scientists, engineers, designers, weavers, and artists practically and theoretically worked with this material locally, regionally, or globally. Lisa Onaga received her PhD in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. She has previously held fellowships with the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, D. Kim Foundation for the History of Science and Technology in East Asia, Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien, and was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia at the University of Tokyo.

Margarida Mendes is a researcher, curator, artist, and educator, exploring the overlap between critical ecology, experimental film, sound practices and ecopedagogy. She creates transdisciplinary forums, exhibitions and experiential works where alternative modes of education and sensing practices may catalyse political imagination and restorative action. Mendes holds a PhD in Philosophy by the Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London, and is a tutor in the GEO-Design Masters at the Design Academy Eindhoven and an affiliated researcher at ICNOVA, university of Lisbon. She was part of the curatorial team of the 11th Liverpool Biennale; 4th Istanbul Design Biennial; and the 11th Gwangju Biennale and has co-directed several educational platforms, such as escuelita at CA2M; The World In Which We Occur/Matter in Flux; and The Barber Shop.

This keynote lecture session is supported by the 'CLASS Joint NTU-ANU NTU-KCL Conference, Symposium and Workshop Scheme', College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University.