Ontological Frame Research Articles

A Justice-Oriented Conceptual and Analytical Framework for Decolonising and Desecularising the Field of Educational Technology

Education systems globally are increasingly being shaped by the logics, assumptions and pedagogical underpinnings of educational technology (EdTech) products, services, programmes, policies, and systems. These often promote rationalistic, secular, universal, objectivist, (post)modernist, written, behaviourist, and individualistic ways of being, marginalising religious, spiritual, oral, subjective, critical, and communitarian ways of being. Given that technological ways of being have been propagated globally, these logics are no longer predominantly promoted by those in the Global North, but by techno-solutionists globally, although the core-to-periphery flows of ideology and funding are still prominent. This article develops a conceptual and analytical framework for decolonising and desecularising the field of EdTech. Concepts are drawn from various discourses: the desecularisation of knowledge to set the ontological framing; embodied cognition to set the epistemological framing; and social justice and decolonial discourses to set the axiological framing. From this, the article develops the Dimensions of Human Injustice Analytical Framework—covering material, ontological and epistemic, and (geo)political injustices—to assist policymakers, educators, EdTech developers, and international development practitioners in identifying and confronting coloniality in their EdTech. Acknowledging the complexity and contentions within decolonial thought, this article does not claim a unified stance on achieving justice but aims to offer a tool for deconstructing and questioning injustices.

Sovereignty cubed: The Arctic as a territorial and ontological volume

State sovereignty over space has traditionally been viewed as confined to a bounded land area. However, scholarship in critical cartography, political, and social theory shows this understanding to be flawed. This perspective not only limits understandings of sovereignty density, but also weakens our understanding of the limits of the state. This is particularly evident in the Arctic, where sovereignty discourse often fails to address the complexities of space in connection with authority and legitimacy for decision-making in the region. This article first critically examines Arctic sovereignty, challenging the notion of sovereignty as merely a horizontal area with land or sea boundaries. Instead, it argues that Arctic geopolitics and governance are better understood when sovereignty is considered as a scalar concept encompassing a territorial volume. Second, it contextualises the processes involved in the legitimisation of sovereignty and governance practices across the Arctic, framing this as ontological sovereignty. The article contends that Arctic sovereignty and governance are more comprehensively understood by shifting from a strictly material perspective to an ontological framing, which encompasses control over the nature and existence of Arctic spaces, with implications for future development and understandings of Arctic governance.

Life in Suspension with Death: Biocultural Ontologies, Perceptual Cues, and Biomarkers forthe Tibetan Tukdam Postmortem Meditative State.

This article presents two cases from a collaborative study among Tibetan monastic populations in India on the postdeath meditative state called tukdam (thugs dam). Entered by advanced Tibetan Buddhist practitioners through a variety of different practices, this state provides an ontological frame that is investigated by two distinct intellectual traditions-the Tibetan Buddhist and medical tradition on one hand and the Euroamerican biomedical and scientific tradition on the other-using their respective means of inquiry. Through the investigation, the traditions enact two paradigms of the body at the time of death alongside attendant conceptualizations of what constitutes life itself. This work examines when epistemologies of these two traditions might converge, under what ontological contexts, and through which correlated indicators of evidence. In doing so, this work explores how these two intellectual traditions might answer how the time course and characteristics of physiological changes during the postmortem period might exhibit variation across individuals. Centrally, this piece presents an epistemological inquiry delineating the types of valid evidence that constitute exceptional processes post-clinical death and their potential ontological implications.

Indigenous relations: craft, vernacular materials and cultural assets in Borneo

ABSTRACT This article explores Indigenous relations to craft, vernacular materials and cultural assets in Borneo to raise awareness around the complexities, entanglements and precarity surrounding natural resources and craft practice(s) located within Indigenous communities. The authors present two case studies based in Sabah and Sarawak, Malaysia from the Cultural-Assets and Vernacular Materials project and in so doing highlight the role ancestral wisdom and embodied knowledge play in the cultivation, conservation and crafting of natural materials towards situating craft as a living, ecological and regenerative practice. We locate an expanded notion of craft whereby the intimate relations to materials – growing, harvesting, preparing – are integral to materialities of place as site-specific, place-based and communal bodies of knowledges that reside within Indigenous communities. We position an ontological framing of design research as a set of practices that broaden the ways craft can advance new ways of understanding, becoming and doing. In such a reframing design-led innovation approaches are cognisant of and informed by the plurality of contexts that reside within and emerge from Indigenous communities as sites of situated knowledges.

What’s In a Name and/or A Frame? Ontological Framing and Naming of Social Actors and Social Responses

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally a communication field. Thus, the study of how AI interacts with us is likely to be heavily driven by communication. The current study examined two things that may impact people’s perceptions of socialness of a social actor: one nonverbal (ontological frame) and one verbal (providing a name) with a 2 (human vs. robot) x 2 (named or not) experiment. Participants saw one of four videos of a study “host” crossing these conditions and responded to various perceptual measures about the socialness and task ability of that host. Overall, data were consistent with hypotheses that whether the social actor was a robot or a human impacted each perception tested, but whether the social actor named themself or not had no effect on any of them, contrary to hypotheses. These results are then discussed, as are directions for future research.

How to frame innovation in mathematics

We discuss conceptual change and progress within mathematics, in particular how tools, structural concepts and representations are transferred between fields that appear to be unconnected or remote from each other. The theoretical background is provided by the frame concept, which is used in linguistics, cognitive science and artificial intelligence to model how explicitly given information is combined with expectations deriving from background knowledge. In mathematical proofs, we distinguish two kinds of frames, namely structural frames and ontological frames. The interaction between both kinds of frames can drive mathematical interpretation. We first discuss two examples where structural frames (formulaic notation) drive ontological development (the discovery or exploration of mathematical objects). The development of Boole’s Boolean algebra may at first appear as a metaphorical treatment of the (then) new area of logic. In the analysis, we discuss how different (aspects of) certain algebraic frames change in the transfer, how arising difficulties are solved and overall argue that Boole uses the numerical algebra frame as a research template for the discovery of a system for calculations in logic. Following Ifrah, we analyse the discovery of zero as an extension to the number ontology as driven by the development of notation. Both structural and ontological frames are extended and simplified as notation progresses. Finally, we discuss two examples from infinite combinatorics, viz. topological graph theory, and one foundational issue. In both examples, the two simultaneous frames about one object are maintained independently. They motivate different research questions, but may also fruitfully interact: shifting between multiple synchronously maintained perspectives acts as a motor of innovation. The analysis shows how a frame-based approach allows to model how different perspectives drive mathematical innovation because they highlight different aspects, questions and heuristics.

Objects of the Anthropocene: Mapping Material-Emotional Culture from Human Beginnings to the End Times

Abstract Objects are complicated things, and no less so when they are created by us. We layer created objects with additional emotional meaning. Understanding the complexity of this layering requires much more than tracing the narrative history of an object. This essay is about the objects that we make and appropriate. In particular, the essay suggests that objects need to be understood sensitively both in the context of global human history, and the ontological framing of the various moments of their creation, use, appropriation and reception. The essay folds around four contentions. Objects are central to the narration of social relations and emotional life. Objects, as carriers of meaning, move across different ontological orientations. Objects exist in multiple and ontologically different time frames, sometimes at the same time. And objects mediate our (human) relation to the larger social and natural world, even as they (and we) are part of that world.

Angela Carter’s Metaleptic Turn: The Possibilities of “a Mutation, of a Revolution in the Propriety of the Symbolic System”

Abstract Angela Carter’s experiences in Japan molded her post-Japan writing: she became more preoccupied with the nature of reality and the status of the subject, which operates for her like Roland Barthes’s empty sign, whose sole reality is its appearance. Carter sought a new model of writing too, which she found partly in bunraku. This paper analyzes the role of bunraku in triggering Carter’s overlapping narrative and ontological frames. That metaleptic turn enables her to disclose the constructedness of the subject in general and the gendered subject in particular. In “The Loves of Lady Purple” and “Flesh and the Mirror,” Carter draws on bunraku for a system of representation that metatextually discloses itself as an aesthetic construction and of its subjects as discursive productions of subjectivity.

(Un)claiming rights, resources, and ocean spaces: Marine genetic resources and area-based management tools in high seas governance negotiations

After years of informal efforts, the parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are negotiating an international legally binding instrument to address governance gaps that have impeded attempts to conserve biodiversity in areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). Though these discussions were initiated in response to concerns about biodiversity, states have used them to advance competing claims regarding rights of access, ownership, and control of ocean spaces and resources. This paper examines how states have discussed ocean space in negotiations regarding area-based management tools (ABMTs) and marine genetic resources (MGRs) at the first three intergovernmental conferences regarding biodiversity in ABNJ. ABMTs, which have become widespread in governing ocean space for conservation, are premised on an ontological framing that ocean space can be divided by geographical boundaries into territories for management. MGRs, on the other hand, are newly recognized governance objects that cross existing spatial boundaries: between areas of national and international jurisdiction, between the seafloor and water column, and between the ocean and the laboratory. Through their mobility, MGRs reveal how territorial forms of governance over material resources intersect with other forms of exclusion, control, and rights-based institutions, suggesting the need to develop creative management regimes that go beyond territorial approaches.

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

Henri Lefebvre's conception of nature-society in the revolutionary project of autogestion

Henri Lefebvre's intricate material-dialectical approach to the nature-society problematic, taken together with his advocacy of a praxis oriented to total transformation from the ground up through autogestion, offers a unified, critical, and dialectical approach to political ecology. Unfortunately, his work in these areas has too often been interpreted as divided and fragmentary, splitting his radical analysis of the production of space-time from his critical praxis related to autogestion. We offer a corrective to this by elaborating briefly on his use of Marx's material-dialectical approach, outlining how Lefebvre brings this method to bear on the nature-society problematic, and how his theorization of autogestion points to a radical praxis aimed at overcoming the social-ecological contradictions of capital. His engagement with Marx's theory of metabolic rift, and his advocacy of a radical project of autogestion as part of the critique of everyday life, serve to place the underlying issue of alienation in spatial terms, offering geography a transformative perspective that avoids positing closed systems and attempting to exhaust the various meanings assigned to nature. In this, Lefebvre demonstrates how the nature-society problematic overflows issues of ontological framing and language, calling for a unity of radical theory and practice to overcome the separations.

The Hill at the End of the World: Cosmopolitics and State Effects in the Bolivian Amazon

ABSTRACT This article compares versions of the Search for the Sacred Hill – a millenarian movement seeking an enchanted terrestrial paradise for indigenous communities in the marshes of North-Eastern Bolivia. Some versions cast the movement as a precursor to real indigenous political action, while others cast it as a trial of faith. I argue that disagreements about the nature of this movement are not errors or distortions. Rather, they enable the production of different effects (different arrangements of bodies and space) depending on the ontological frame of reference through which they are evaluated. This comparison brings together literature on ‘state effects’ (the epistemological tools for managing people and space which place the state in a position of authority) and literature on ‘cosmopolitics’ (the relationships and interconnections between multiple worlds), both of which have at their heart a concern with the relationship between epistemological authority and the arrangement of bodies and space.

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Ali Smith's and Olivia Laing's Fictions of Immediacy

Cognition in moral space: A minimal model

We describe moral cognition as a process occurring in a distinctive cognitive space, wherein moral relationships are defined along several morally relevant dimensions. After identifying candidate dimensions, we show how moral judgments can emerge in this space directly from object perception, without any appeal to moral rules or abstract values. Our reductive “minimal model” (Batterman & Rice, 2014) elaborates Beal’s (2020) claim that moral cognition is determined, at the most basic level, by “ontological frames” defining subjects, objects, and the proper relation between them. We expand this claim into a set of formal hypotheses that predict moral judgments based on how objects are “framed” in the relevant dimensions of “moral space.”

Expanded Education and Global Integration: Solidarity and Conflict

The dramatic expansion and rising social significance of education integrates the world’s populations and elites under a common ontological frame and on the basis of common human identities rooted in educational status and cultural content. Education-based integration supports institutions of solidarity – large-scale organizational structures in national and global societies, and common cognitive and normative cultural materials. It also creates expanded grounds for conflict. In this essay, we review the matter.

Ge-stell, simulacro y matrix: Dispositivos de sentido en Heidegger, Baudrillard y Holzapfel

Se desarrolla una breve exégesis de los planteamientos de Heidegger, Baudrillard y Holzapfel, que describirían una sociedad posmoderna al borde del vacío o, si se prefiere, al límite del sin-sentido. Dichos marcos ontológicos —el Ge-stell, el simulacro y la matrix, respectivamente— remiten no solo a un sobre-poblamiento de datos, sino particularmente a un despliegue, por decirlo así, irrefrenable de dispositivos tecnológicos. Guardando las distancias teóricas del caso, estos tres pensadores, cada uno a su manera, parecen describir en qué consistiría este Leviatán posmoderno, formado por aplicaciones, interfaces, el 6G y toda gama de hiperconexiones de la que es capaz hoy día la tecnología. Se tiene en cuenta la conjetura de Malabou, para quien, a propósito de su recepción del Ge-stell heideggeriano, los objetos tecnológicos nunca se presentan como objetos vacíos, sino que siempre suponen una cierta mutación ontológica. Tal transformación, desde luego, es la de nosotros mismos. Una visión futurista perfectamente pudiera mostrar a una tribu de replicantes, armados —es casi seguro— de una tecnología hoy inimaginable, pero, sin embargo, abocados a esa tarea casi mística de dotación de sentido.

A REVIEW ON ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AS A POTENTIAL TOOL FOR ARCHITECTURAL STUDIES

Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is an ontological approach, emerging from science and technology studies. As an ontological frame, ANT proposes that the work of science does not differ from other social processes, and sociality should not be understood as a priori knowledge. Instead, ANT offers a lens to see science as an assemblage of social, technical, conceptional, and textual processes entangled with human and non-human entities by looking at their material nature. ANT proposes to follow traces of material relations and how that material nature constitutes social. There has been a considerable increase in the threshold of ANT and Architecture studies. ANT seems to offer new perspectives to understand architecture by looking at architecture from its own material reality. Thus, this study aims to reveal the whole picture of the studies in the threshold of ANT and architecture by analyzing ANT concepts implemented in architecture. By relating ANT concepts to the architectural field, this systematic review aims to understand ANT and its implications of architectural studies. Visualizing the relations of ANT and architecture related categories, the review is supposed to reveal gaps and the most studied fields of ANT in architecture.

Digital Rights, Digital Citizenship and Digital Literacy: What’s the Difference?

Using digital media is complicated. Invasions of privacy, increasing dataveillance, digital-by-default commercial and civic transactions and the erosion of the democratic sphere are just some of the complex issues in modern societies. Existential questions associated with digital life challenge the individual to come to terms with who they are, as well as their social interactions and realities. In this article, we identify three contemporary normative responses to these complex issues –digital citizenship, digital rights and digital literacy. These three terms capture epistemological and ontological frames that theorise and enact (both in policy and everyday social interactions) how individuals learn to live in digitally mediated societies. The article explores the effectiveness of each in addressing the philosophical, ethical and practical issues raised by datafication, and the limitations of human agency as an overarching goal within these responses. We examine how each response addresses challenges in policy, everyday social life and political rhetoric, tracing the fluctuating uses of these terms and their address to different stakeholders. The article concludes with a series of conceptual and practical ‘action points’ that might optimise these responses to the benefit of the individual and society.

Mathematics is Ontology? A Critique of Badiou's Ontological Framing of Set Theory

This article develops a criticism of Alain Badiou’s assertion that “mathematics is ontology.” I argue that despite appearances to the contrary, Badiou’s case for bringing set theory and ontology together is problematic. To arrive at this judgment, I explore how a case for the identification of mathematics and ontology could work. In short, ontology would have to be characterised to make it evident that set theory can contribute to it fundamentally. This is indeed how Badiou proceeds in Being and Event. I review his descriptions of the ontological problematic at some length here, only to argue that set theory is a poor fit. Although philosophers working on questions of being were certainly occupied with matters of oneness and the part-whole relationship, I argue that Badiou’s discussion of philosophical sources points towards a mereological treatment, not a set-theoretic one. Finally, I suggest that Badiou’s philosophical interpretations of key set-theoretic results are better understood as some sort of analogising between mathematics, ontology, and philosophical anthropology.

Delhi: A Metaphor of Hope and Despair in Delhi and Twilight in Delhi

This paper is an effort to de-construct the two opposite ideas of hope and despair in Ahmed Ali's Twilight in Delhi and Khushwant Singh's Delhi. The comparative points of view regarding Delhi by Singh and Ali serve to construct the ideological, political and ontological framing of Delhi. The paper explores the significance of Delhi as a symbol of political energy which distributes power or snatches it as an active agent of power-history. The paper exhibits the socio-political, economic and communal structures portrayed by Ali and Singh. The study is an effort to detect the system of representation in the metaphor of Delhi in the context of power-resistance and failure of the struggle against the Raj. The paper tries to show that both Ali and Singh see Delhi with a difference of outlook and literary approach to manifest hope and despair.