CALLING SHARKS, REWRITING LAWS FROM THE LANDSCAPE
In the late 2010s the Alliance of Solwara Warriors drove the company Nautilus Minerals out of Papua New Guinea’s waters and into bankruptcy—a unique victory for coastal communities confronting seabed mining multinationals. The Alliance is now joined by Wokisok Associations Incorporated to revive shark-calling, a practice that historically encoded laws of relation and stewardship among humans and non-humans. Its Secretary, Godfrey Jordan Abage, describes shark-calling as emblematic of customary governance: adaptive practices rooted in environmental attunement that script rules for land-sea continuity and marine resource use. This knowledge is eroding, concentrated among a thinning group of elders. The project will conduct oral histories with the nine remaining elder shark-callers in the area, produce filmic and photographic work for wide dissemination, and inform a policy paper for civil society organisations drafting national ocean policies.

Project collaborators:
Godfrey Jordan Abage (Wokisok Associations Incorporated); Jonathan Mesulam (West Coast Development Foundation); John Childs (Lancaster University); Lisa Rave (Independent Artist and Filmmaker); Armin Linke (Academy of Fine Arts Munich); Philippa Louey (Lancaster Environment Centre); Jesse Olszynko-Gryn and Thomas Turnbull (MPIWG); Jonathan Galka (KTH Royal Institute of Technology); Ute Meta Bauer and Mei Jia Ng (NTU)

FOREST FOODS OF JHARKHAND: DOCUMENTING FOOD AND MEDICINAL KNOWLEDGE WITH INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES
The forest foods and medicinal knowledge of the Jharkhand’s Indigenous communities exist almost entirely in oral form, held by a shrinking number of practitioners. Colonial-era legislation that once criminalised the harvesting of Indigenous forest foods in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand produced a legacy of shame that has continued to suppress community knowledge today. Revival requires acknowledging what disrupted the relationship between communities and their forests. Responding to this urgent reality, the project will work with the Oraon and Munda communities in Ranchi district to produce six to eight short documentary films alongside a multilingual oral archive, returning these recorded materials to the communities. The project acknowledges a living biocultural practice, shaped by the ongoing relationship between communities, forest ecosystems, and seasonal rhythms. At its core, it explores interdependence—between people and forest, between food and medicine, between elders who carry knowledge and youth who transmit it—as a living relational practice. Beyond documentation, it creates conditions for communities to reclaim, validate, and actively share their own knowledge on their own terms.

Project collaborators:
Jyoti Shukla (Cultural Researcher, Indigeneity); Lachlan Summers (MPIWG); Ashif Shaheer K (NTU)

MAPPING BIOCULTURAL ASSEMBLAGES: VERNACULAR BUILDING AND ECOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE ORANG SELETAR ARCHIVE
Mapping Biocultural Assemblages is a collaborative project between terriStories, a multidisciplinary research and design studio in Thailand, and Orang Seletar communities along the Johor Strait. It centres on the community’s only physical archive, a small stilted structure built and maintained by community members overlooking the strait. As Orang Seletar communities face accelerating pressures from coastal development, displacement, and loss of access to traditional territories, the project asks how building and caring for an archive can itself be understood as knowledge-making. More than a material repository, the archive is a living site where ancestral knowledge, environmental histories, and oral traditions are gathered, interpreted, and transmitted across generations. Through documentary and analytical diagramming, particular attention is given to its vernacular architecture: a structure traditionally built from mangrove wood, nipa palm, bamboo, and chengal hardwood—materials embodying generations of ecological knowledge, and increasingly difficult to source because of reclamation and deforestation.

Project collaborators:
Feifei Zhou (terriStories studio); Laura Miotto (NTU); Lakshmi Pradeep (MPIWG); Jefree Salim (Seletar Cultural and Arts Society); Jos Diaz (Studio Futuro)

THINKING AND BEING LIKE A HONEYBEE: BIOCULTURAL WORLDING OF HUMANS AND HONEYBEE
Human association with honeybees dates back more than 10,000 years, and honeybees are critical pollinators for global agroforests and biodiversity. Much of what we know of the wild honeybees comes from Indigenous and traditional forest-dwelling communities, for whom the relationship is rooted in spiritual belief and cosmology—an elaborate system of ritual, reciprocity and ancestral mediation that regulates life in the forest. Thinking and Being Like a Honeybee documents the living world of the Kattunayakans, a hunter-gatherer society in the forests of southern India, and their long-standing relationship with Apis dorsata, the giant honeybee. A community co-production workshop in Wayanad will produce a multimedia documentary archive of honey-hunting ritual, the honey-gathering song-prayers, and oral cosmologies of human-bee entanglement.

Project collaborators:
Helina Jolly (University of Vermont); Riaz Howey (MPIWG); Veronica Ranner (NTU); Terre Satterfield (University of British Columbia)

TURTLE RADIO: A TRANSLOCAL PLATFORM FOR RESONANCES ACROSS THE INDIAN OCEAN
Turtle Radio is a participatory, translocal listening platform connecting histories, songs, and memories of turtles across the Indian Ocean. Turtles and tortoises have dispersed across the Indian Ocean for millennia alongside humans, linking islands through migration routes that predate national borders. These histories transcend the boundaries of any single island yet have not been rigorously (re)connected across a region now characterised by political fragmentation, species loss, and uneven conservation regimes. Assembling a team across La Réunion, Seychelles, Comoros, Singapore, and Madagascar, the project bridges geographies through human and turtle relations while honouring local specificities. It prioritises relationality, producing a resonant archive where stories are relayed—a practice of echolocating relation. This pilot project establishes three inaugural audio transmissions, digital infrastructure, collaborative network necessary for hosting two public listening activation and enabling longer-term transoceanic and interregional exchange.

Project collaborators:
Chanelle Adams (MPIWG); Tapsi Mathur (NTU); Connie Tan (Live Turtle and Tortoise Museum of Singapore); Jean-Christophe Royoux (Fonds régional d'art contemporain de La Réunion); Peter Nicholls (Seychelles Origins Project); Myriam Omar Awadi (Independent artist); Miranto Rafanomezana (Independent artist, musician and designer)

WHEN AI MEETS ANCIENT KNOWLEDGE: PROTECTING TRADITIONAL MEDICINE IP AND GOVERNING BENEFIT-SHARING IN THE AGE OF COMPUTATIONAL DRUG DISCOVERY
Indigenous and traditional communities across Southeast Asia have developed and transmitted healing knowledge over centuries. Today, that knowledge faces a qualitatively new form of extraction: AI drug discovery platforms can mine historical medical texts and ethnobotanical databases at industrial scale, identifying bioactive compounds without community contact, consent, or compensation. Existing legal frameworks, designed for physical sample collection, are architecturally unable to address this threat. This workshop convenes scholars in medical humanities, IP law, Indigenous data sovereignty, AI ethics, and blockchain architecture. It will produce ethical guidelines for AI-driven ethnopharmacological research at NTU, with direct application to a forthcoming community data collection programme at NTU’s Herbal Garden and to the Polyglot Asian Medicine text-mining projects. It will also assess the feasibility of a blockchain-based Traditional Knowledge IP (TKIP) registry, through which communities could register a cryptographic fingerprint of their knowledge without disclosing its content, and be privately alerted if a patent or AI-derived compound subsequently matches it. Community knowledge holders from Sarawak and Bangladesh are central partners. Outputs will include published ethical guidelines and a TKIP feasibility paper, engaging the 2024 WIPO Treaty implementation process and the WHO’s current Traditional Knowledge IP Whitepaper.

Project collaborators:
Michael Stanley Baker, Li Yi, Wilson Wen Bin Goh, Saidul Islam (NTU); Jahid Siraz Chowdhury (Asian Institute of Technology); Sarawak Biodiversity Centre; Sarah Lang, Calvin Yeh (MPIWG Digital Humanities Team)

WORLDING WITH BOREENDO, THROUGH BOREENDO: BIOCULTURAL ENTANGLEMENTS WITHIN THARI COSMOVISIONS
This place- and practice-led project emerges in response, and in resistance, to the Thar Coal Act of 2012 and the consequent and ongoing toxification of land, water and life in Sahra-e Thar, the Thar Desert of Pakistan. This project grounds itself in an ancient earthen wind instrument, the Boreendo. Named after the termitaries whose forms it mirrors, it is shaped on the potter’s wheel and marked with openings to produce melodies that embody the sounds and emotions of this landscape. Biocultural worlding is explored here as an intimate, relational practice alongside the residents of Jogi Marhee, a traditional potters’ village in Thar, and Ustaad Faqir Zulfiqar, one of the few remaining Boreendo makers and performers. An instrument for worlding, the Boreendo, draws forth the narratives that have shaped the Thari cosmovision—and calls into question the manufactured condition of emptiness that is used to justify extraction. Building on the region’s oral traditions, the project invites a collaborative approach to listening to the landscape, using audio-visual field recordings, drawings, site-writings and clay experiments.

Project collaborators:
Hira Rasool (Independent Researcher); Mannat Johal (MPIWG); Sushma Griffin (NTU); Ustaad Faqir Zulfiqar (Boreendo maker and performer)