Ontological Conflicts Research Articles

Working knowledge, uncertainty and ontological politics: An ethnography of UK long covid clinics.

Long covid (persistent COVID-19) is a new disease with contested aetiology and variable prognosis. We report a 2-year ethnography of UK long covid clinics. Using a preformative lens, we show that multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) built working knowledge based on shared practices, mutual trust, distributed cognition (e.g. emails, record entries), relational knowledge of what was at stake for the patient, and harnessing uncertainty to open new discursive spaces. Most long covid MDTs performed the working knowledge of 'rehabilitation', a linked set of practices oriented to ensuring that the patient understood and strove to 'correct' maladaptive physiological responses (e.g. through breathing exercises) and pursued recovery goals, supported by physiotherapists, psychologists and generalist clinicians. Some MDTs with a higher proportion of doctors (e.g. cardiologists, neurologists, immunologists) enacted the working knowledge of 'microscopic damage', seeking to elucidate and rectify long covid's underlying molecular and cellular pathology. They justified non-standard investigations and medication in selected patients by co-constructing an evidentiary narrative based on biological mechanisms. Working knowledge was ontologically concordant within MDTs but sometimes discordant between MDTs. Overt ontological conflict occurred mostly when patients attending 'rehabilitation' clinics invoked the working knowledge of microscopic damage that had been generated and circulated in online support communities.

The role of emotions in ontological conflicts: a case of study of the territorial–ontological conflict between British Columbia, Coastal GasLink and the Wet’suwet’en

The role of emotions in ontological conflicts: a case of study of the territorial–ontological conflict between British Columbia, Coastal GasLink and the Wet’suwet’en

Technological power, complex systems, and boundary objects in global energy transitions

This study makes a case for why the field of political ecology (PE) would benefit from deep engagement with technological power, and exemplifies this within the domain of energy studies and the ongoing transformation of the energy sector. Technology is not among the core interests or traditional topics of PE—and is therefore often disregarded or treated as a black box. The argument presented in this study asserts that this omission undermines the analytical power and the relevance of the field. Technology is the central mechanism whereby socionatures evolve and how relationships are negotiated and enacted. The attitude towards technical things is partly based on the idea that technologies are just artefacts of little interest. Cross-field dialogue is also hindered by perceived ontological conflicts. This study draws upon research from the philosophy of technology and sociotechnical systems theory to introduce a dynamic understanding of technological power. Seeing what technology does and has the potential to do requires looking beyond the common emphasis on dominance and control, to the myriad ways in which technologies shape our everyday lives, ontologies, and imagining of the future. Taking on a contentious concept, I advocate for the use of “systems” as a boundary object suitable for cross-field dialogue. As an analytical construct without inherent scale, it works as a framing device for moving power and knowledge claims to the forefront, while also allowing dialogue outside academia.

Ontological Conflicts in the Context of Existential Guilt

İnsan varoluşu, paradoksal yapılar üzerine inşa edilmiş bir gerçekliktir. Varoluş, zeminindeki bu yapılar arasındaki denge durumlarında gerçekleşir. İnsan, sürekli oluş halinde olduğu için ontolojik zeminde gerçekleşen denge halleri de sürekli yeni denge durumlarına gebedir. İnsanla ilgili araştırma konusu yapılacak her ne varsa bu yapılarda bir dayanak aranması gerekmektedir. Günah veya varoluşsal suç meselesi de ontolojik arka planı açısından bu yapılara dayanmaktadır. Çalışmamızda söz konusu yapıların çatışma ve uyum durumlarında gerçekleşen ritim hallerinin sahih olmayan bir varoluş yani varoluşsal suç ürettiği süreçler ele alınmıştır. Varoluşsal suç meselesi daha çok varoluşçu yaklaşımın bakış açısı çerçevesinde ve onto-teolojik bağlamıyla tasvir edilmiştir. Çalışmayı bizim için önemli kılan temel saik, varoluşsal suçun ve/veya günahın insan varoluşunun bizatihi kendisiyle ilintisinin varoluşsal açıdan ortaya konulmasıyla alakalıdır. Varoluşsal suç meselesi ele alınırken daha çok tasvirci yöntemle meselenin resmi ortaya konulmaya çalışılmış, gerekli görülen yerlerde de çeşitli analizlerde bulunulmuştur. Özgürlük-kader paradoksu trajik olanı insan varlığına iliştirmiş ve bunun neticesinde trajik olandaki umutsuzluk ve kaygı durumunun sebep olduğu günah durumu ile karşılaşılmıştır. Dinamik-form çatışması dramatik olanı insan varlığına iliştirmiş ve dramatik olandaki acının sebep olduğu anlamsızlık ve boşluktan haz arayan günahkârlık ortaya çıkmıştır. Bireysellik-katılım çatışması ise trajikomik olanı insan varlığına iliştirmiş ve trajikomik olanın sebep olduğu kimlik sorunundan kaynaklanan kendini kandırmaya dayalı egonun günahkârlığı ortaya çıkmıştır. Bütün bunların dayandığı ve görülmesini istediğimiz sav ise günahın yüzeysel birtakım saiklerden değil insan varoluşunun zemini olan diyadik yapısından ve bir yanıyla da onun varoluşu için zorunluluk ifade eden bir ontolojik arka plandan kaynaklanıyor olduğudur. Günah işlemek insanı suçlu yapabilir ama günah işleyebilme imkânının varlığı insanı özgür varlık kılan ve varoluşun gerçekleşmesi için zorunluluk ifade eden varoluşsal bir boşluktur.

Ontological Collisions in the Northern Territory's Aboriginal Water Rights Policy

ABSTRACTAmid a renewed push to extract water for agriculture and mining, Indigenous advocacy in northern Australia has resulted in the introduction of a new water allocation mechanism: a reserve of water to be retained for the use and benefit of Indigenous communities. Our socio‐legal analysis of the Oolloo Water Allocation Plan shows that the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves carry essential hallmarks of neoliberal property relations and are founded in the modernist mode of regulating extracted water as a commodity divisible from land, amenable to partitioning and disarticulated from socio‐cultural relations. Informed by ethnographic material from the Daly River region gathered over almost a century, we describe the hydro‐social relations that are created through customary traditions and practices, water planning and licencing, and the interaction between different scales of water movement and decision‐making by both the state and Traditional Owners. The paper contributes in several ways to research that has identified ontological conflicts as central to disagreements over water and pointed to the difficulty of articulating theoretical framings of ontological difference with the practical work of water negotiations. It shows how the new Indigenous water rights discourse that coincided with the commodification of water in wider Australia shaped the way in which Aboriginal people of this region have more recently articulated their relationships to the Daly River and the limits to state recognition of those relationships. We find that the Reserve model is unable to recognize the capacity of water to connect and unify people and other beings, as well as to define boundaries between them. Within a regime that facilitates resource extraction, a limited opening has been created for Aboriginal people to benefit from this model of economic development, yet we argue that there is reason to fear that the divisions the Aboriginal Water Reserve enacts between waters and land presents significant socio‐cultural risks.

Ontological Conflicts in the Plurinational State: The Case of Indigenous Resistance against the Mirador Mega-Mining Project in Ecuador

This article focuses on ontological conflicts over territoriality in Ecuador’s plurinational state. Departing from an ontological perspective, we examine how the Ecuadorian government and Indigenous communities battle over different ways of relating to and existing through territories, and thus over ways of practicing or undermining plurinationality. We offer a historical analysis of plurinationality, a proposal that is constituted by concrete territorial practices of Indigenous self-determination and that challenges the homogenized idea of the nation. We show how this proposal, though adopted in Ecuador’s 2008 Constitution, was undermined by the government’s subsequent expansion of extractive projects. To illustrate how this ontological conflict played out in concrete terms, we focus on Indigenous resistance to the mega-mining project Mirador in Ecuador’s southern Amazon. While the state’s capacity to territorially assert itself has led to the displacement of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous communities continue to claim and invoke this territory as their own.

The Causes and Slow Release Strategies of Examinee of Physical Education College Entrance Examination Competitive State Anxiety from the Perspective of "Conflict Theory"

Based on the "conflict theory" as the research threshold, this paper uses the methods of literature review, interview, logical analysis, etc., taking the competitive state anxiety of college entrance examination students in physical education as the research object, aiming at analyzing the causes of their competitive state anxiety. The research holds that the competitive state anxiety of college entrance examination students in physical education is an ontological conflict phenomenon caused by internal and external contradictions. The causes include the conflict between the high cost of study and the difficult family economic situation, the conflict between the actual achievement status and the test score requirements for further studies, the conflict between the low pay of one's own efforts and the high return of to be No.1, and the conflict between meeting the high expectations of others and overcoming one's self-distrust. It is necessary to analyze the causes, and put forward that it is necessary to recognize the bounden duty of students to study, train hard to improve their test scores, establish a sense of goal, balance the relationship between pay and return, and dialectically treat the relationship between others' expectations and self-truth.

Indigenous Heritage and Ontological Conflicts in the Southcentral Andes

Abstract: Taking inspiration from the epistemological potential of the Aymara concept of taypi this contribution aims to show the persistence of Indigenous peoples' self-determination and community governance in contemporary heritage politics. A multisited archaeological ethnography across Tiwanaku (Bolivia) and the Calchaquí valleys (Tucumán, Argentina) brings to light the long memories of anti-colonial resistance in the southcentral Andes and visualizes heritage-making practices in their ecological dimension, bridging multiple temporalities and territorial relatedness. The resulting picture figures a deep-seated tension between regulatory policies that adjust indigenous heritage to universal classifications and values embedded in the modern nation-state imaginaries, and emancipatory politics in which heritage claims are entangled with the social reproduction of community life and with the reparation of historical injustices. This twofold political dimension materializes in the legal artefact of the free, prior, informed consultation (FPIC), whose long memory of ambiguity is traced down to the early day of colonization. The article argues that consent-seeking mechanisms create an intermediate space where universal and place-based worldmaking designs converge. Locating these grey areas in time and space is crucial for addressing intercultural histories and future-oriented practices of heritage rights.

Transformative agents of change and investigative neurotechnologies: A qualitative study of psychedelic technology identities

Clinical and basic science research with psychedelics is a nascent but rapidly growing field. Historically, psychedelics research has faced setbacks due to overenthusiasm, methodological challenges, and conflicting worldviews. This can in part be attributed to the dual heritages of spiritualism and science that ground western psychedelic use. Through semi-structured interviews with Australian researchers, we explore how issues of ontological conflict are playing out in contemporary research, using the analytical frame of promissory technology identities. We illustrate two identities currently at play that are invoked and negotiated by researchers: psychedelics as transformative agents of change and as investigational neurotechnologies. We argue that these identities represent differing ontological heritages in psychedelics research and may affect the design, interpretation and translation of clinical and neuroscientific psychedelics research. These identities exist in compromise, though not without tensions that may rupture or resolve as the field matures, such as priorisation of clinical research versus basic or preclinical research, Researchers appear sensitive to a need to pragmatically deploy both identities in order to engage the diverse stakeholders required for research and translation. This paper both provides a case study of promissory technology identities, and demonstraties the concept's usefulness as a framework for understanding the social factors that affect the production, communication and reception of evidence in the development of novel technologies.

Memory, counter-memory and denialism: How search engines circulate information about the Holodomor-related memory wars

Search engines, such as Google or Yandex, shape social reality by informing their users about current and historical phenomena. However, there is little research on how search engines deal with contested memories, which are subjected to ontological conflicts known as memory wars. In this article, we investigate how search engines circulate information about memory wars related to the Holodomor, a mass famine caused by Soviet repressive politics in Ukraine in 1932–1933. For this aim, we conduct an agent-based audit of four search engines—Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, and Yandex—and examine how their top search results represent the Holodomor and related memory wars. Our findings demonstrate that search engines prioritize interpretations of the Holodomor aligning with specific sides in the memory wars, thus becoming memory warriors themselves.

The Political Ontology of Corporate Social Responsibility: Obscuring the Pluriverse in Place

This article examines corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the lens of political ontology. We contend that CSR is not only a discursive mean of legitimization but an inherently ontological practice through which particular worlds become real. CSR enables the politics of place-making, connecting humans and nonhumans in specific territorial configurations in accordance with corporate needs and interests. We discuss three CSR mechanisms of singularization that create a particular corporate ontology in place: (1) community engagements that form ‘stakeholders’; (2) CSR standards and certifications that produce singular sustainable environments; and (3) CSR reporting that erases ontological conflicts and enables the singularized representation (of the environment and the community) to travel to other locations of the corporate world. We argue that these ontological CSR practices obscure the pluriverse of other world and place-making practices that would create different kinds of sustainabilities based on less extractive and non-corporate ways of being in place.

Computer mediation vs. dialogic communication: How media affordances affect organization-public relationship building

The ontological conflict between computer mediation and dialogic communication—a normative ideal for ethical organization-public relationship building rooted in interpersonal literature—has attracted much scholarly attention, and in particular has generated the notion that mediated dialogue is a self-contradictory concept. In this study, we question this argument and provide empirical evidence by conducting a survey that links media channels’ affordances to their capability to carry organizations’ dialogic orientations. Results show that bandwidth and social presence affordances facilitate dialogic communication while anonymity slightly inhibits it, whether the communicative context is proactive or reactive. Social presence exerts the greatest impact on how publics perceive organizations’ dialogic orientations, and anonymity’s negative role was overstated by previous studies. Assessing media channels’ dialogic affordances, we found video conferencing and instant messaging to be the most dialogic channels for mediated organization-public communication.

Author-Driven Computable Data and Ontology Production for Taxonomists

Author-Driven Computable Data and Ontology Production for Taxonomists

Challenges and opportunities for assisted regional ecosystem adaptation: International experience and implications for adaptation research.

Maintaining the functional integrity of ecosystems as climate pressures exceed natural rates of adaptation requires new knowledge and new approaches to governance and management. However, research into management interventions to assist regional ecosystem adaptation has generated both scientific and ethical debate. This paper reviews experience to date in order to identify the challenges and opportunities for assisted regional ecosystem adaptation and reflect on the implications for ongoing adaptation research. The review was informed by a database and structured analysis of some 450 reports, peer-reviewed manuscripts and books on participation theory and experience with novel technology development and assisted ecosystem adaptation. We identified five classes of challenges to adaptation research: 1) scientific conflicts and debates over the “facts”, 2) social challenges, 3) governance challenges, 4) epistemic challenges, and 5) ontological conflicts. We argue that engagement strategies linked to the multiple objectives of adaptation research provide opportunities for ecosystem adaptation.

Worlding a Mbya-Guarani heritage: from dissonant heritage to ontological conflicts

ABSTRACT The article analyses the ontological conflicts implicit but not addressed during the process that registered the ruins of the Jesuit-Guarani Mission in São Miguel (Brazil) as intangible cultural heritage: ‘Tava, Place of Reference for the Guarani People’. The process can be understood as an appropriation of the tools of modernity that provides an indigenous and dissonant narrative of the missions, counters discrimination and affirms the Mbya-Guarani when they negotiate with the state. However, the research also revealed that the conceptualisation of tava is based on a different ontology from modernity – on which the category of heritage is still based – that is related to the importance for the Mbya-Guarani of building good and beautiful bodies and social relations by wandering through the land left to them by the gods and following the precepts and signs of the latter. Instead of perpetuating the hierarchies between ontologies, the article brings to light the ontological conflicts with the objectives of overcoming the limitations of the policies of recognition and enhancing the perspective of heritage as a regime of care not only for objects, places and practices, but also for the people and worlds for whom these things are heritage.

Decolonizing cartography and ontological conflict: Counter-mapping in Colombia and “cartographies otherwise”

Discussions in decolonial literature have recently drawn on the concept of “ontological conflict” to reflect on the conflictual entanglements of diverse cosmologies. In Latin America (as elsewhere) these conflicts are frequently of a territorial nature, with indigenous and black communities making claims to communal land rights as indispensable part of their respective ways of being-in-the-world, which the post-colonial state has increasingly begun to acknowledge, often in the form of new political constitutions. In this article I examine the role of cartography in the resolution of such ontological conflicts; in particular a participatory mapping exercise in Colombia known as “social cartography,” which aims to challenge dominant cartographic representations and empowering local communities vis-à-vis the state. At the same time, I reflect on the limits of such an emancipatory vision and on the ways in which Colombia's version of counter-mapping has been coopted by dominant power. Inspired by the Modernity/Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, I contextualize this experience within other radical mapping exercises, or “cartographies otherwise,” in places such as Australia, Palestine and the Straits of Gibraltar, to finally suggest that the art of decolonizing cartography may be seen as a tool of Hardt & Negri's project of a multitude in resistance.

The Charnegroes: Black Africans and the Ontological Conflict in Catalonia

This paper frames an in depth reflection on the current social and political changes and the emerging phenomenon of body politics of migrant and racialized groups in Europe. The ongoing discussion aims to address the meaning of “being” Catalan for Black Africans in Catalonia. It is grounded on a criterion of ontological commitment and the epistemological aspect of ethnography. I dig into the debate about what makes a racial identity salient in the context of national identity rhetoric. I look thoroughly at the outcomes of the encounter between Black African migrants and the constant resignification of Catalan national identity. I aim to disentangle the racial premises and tackle what Black Africans share once the racial questions are removed. My approach stands within the growing field of postcolonial criticism to understand historical continuities and ontological conflicts. I focus on culture, race, and identity to analyze the cultural dynamics of Senegalese migrants and Equatoguinean communities within the national identity building process in Catalonia. I coined a new concept, Charnegroes, to propose a practical explanation of the emergence of body politics and the changing reality of the relationship between the “us” and the “other” under the recurrent transitions between old and new, colonial and postcolonial, the past and the future.

The multiple landscapes of Biedjovággi: Ontological conflicts on indigenous land

Abstract In this article, we engage with environmental conflicts on indigenous land through a focus on an attempt to gain social licence to reopen and operate the Biedjovággi mine in Guovdageainnu/Kautokeino in Sápmi, Norway. We argue that mining prospects bring forth ontological conflicts concerning land use, as well as ways to know the landscape and the envisioned future that the land holds. It is a story of a conflict between two different ways of knowing. The paper explores the Sámi landscape through different concepts, practices and stories. We then contrast this to the way the same landscape is understood and narrated by a mining company, through the programmes and documents produced according to the Norwegian law and standards. We follow Ingold’s argument that the Sámi landscape practices are taskscapes, where places, times and tasks are interconnected. These were not acknowledged in the plans and documents of the mining company. We conclude by addressing the tendency of extractive industries to reduce different landscapes in ways that fit with modern understandings, which oppose culture to nature.

図書館情報学における存在論の対立

図書館情報学における存在論の対立

Tzuultaq’a: defensa territorial y diferencia radical entre los mayas q’eqchi’

The objective of this paper is to argue that the territorial conflicts that affect the Q’eqchi’ Mayan people of Sierra de las Minas, Guatemala, represent ontological conflicts which defend not only a set of natural resources, but a radical ontological difference that reflects particular ways of living. This analysis is crystallized mainly through the q’eqchi ‘notion of Tzuultaq’a. The work was built based on qualitative methodology, ethnographic work, and interviews conducted throughout 2017 in different Q’eqchi’ and Poqomchi’ Maya communities of the Ribacó micro-region, municipality of Purulhá, Baja Verapaz, in Sierra de las Minas, Guatemala. In this text, there is an analysis of the data from the perspective proposed by existential hermeneutics and, consequently, the conclusion is that the territorial disputes that take place in this region are not limited to the geographic and cultural scope, but that they are rooted in a radical ontological difference.