Relational Ontology Research Articles

Rethinking playfulness: things, bodies, and ideas as play partners and their agency in mediated sex, kink, and BDSM spaces

ABSTRACT Play and its material-semiotic configurations are being acknowledged more and more as creative and formative forces in socio-cultural spatialization. However, subject-centered epistemologies of the roles of materiality and the thing still haunt perspectives on play. This theoretical article critically approaches and reevaluates the concept of ‘playfulness’ via affect theory in a relational ontology of play. Thinking of playfulness as a relation between bodies, things, and ideas gathered as ‘play partners’ which co-enable each other’s capacities for play evades viewing it as a causal mental state of the subject or a mere outcome of play as a practice. Rather, drawing from Lugones, playfulness can be grasped as a differential, pre-individual type of spatializing affect which is primary to play. Finally, thinking with the recent series How to Build a Sex Room, the theoretical account links to a reading of the agency of playful things in the real-and-imagined spaces of sex, kink and BDSM.

Transitioning From Traditional Sport to Esport: Exploring Sport Psychology Practitioners’ Experiences

Sport psychology practitioners are increasingly operating in the esport domain. Yet it remains unclear how practitioners who have exclusively been trained in traditional sport develop a contextually grounded understanding of their practice in esport. This study, framed from an ontological relativism and epistemological interpretivism approach, involved semistructured interviews with 10 qualified practitioners (three female, seven male) who transitioned from traditional sport to esport. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and presented via three composite vignettes: (a) My wish was to feel a part of the team, but there’s no team; (b) To be honest, did I have assumptions going into esport? Absolutely!; and (c) Esport is the wild, wild west. Our findings offer insights on the hurdles associated with transitioning from traditional sport to esport, thus highlighting the important role that esport organizations, training routes, and educational institutions have in supporting practitioners to ethically and effectively work in this domain.

ProFun-SOM: Protein Function Prediction for Specific Ontology Based on Multiple Sequence Alignment Reconstruction.

Protein function prediction is crucial for understanding species evolution, including viral mutations. Gene ontology (GO) is a standardized representation framework for describing protein functions with annotated terms. Each ontology is a specific functional category containing multiple child ontologies, and the relationships of parent and child ontologies create a directed acyclic graph. Protein functions are categorized using GO, which divides them into three main groups: cellular component ontology, molecular function ontology, and biological process ontology. Therefore, the GO annotation of protein is a hierarchical multilabel classification problem. This hierarchical relationship introduces complexities such as mixed ontology problem, leading to performance bottlenecks in existing computational methods due to label dependency and data sparsity. To overcome bottleneck issues brought by mixed ontology problem, we propose ProFun-SOM, an innovative multilabel classifier that utilizes multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to accurately annotate gene ontologies. ProFun-SOM enhances the initial MSAs through a reconstruction process and integrates them into a deep learning architecture. It then predicts annotations within the cellular component, molecular function, biological process, and mixed ontologies. Our evaluation results on three datasets (CAFA3, SwissProt, and NetGO2) demonstrate that ProFun-SOM surpasses state-of-the-art methods. This study confirmed that utilizing MSAs of proteins can effectively overcome the two main bottlenecks issues, label dependency and data sparsity, thereby alleviating the root problem, mixed ontology. A freely accessible web server is available at http://bliulab.net/ ProFun-SOM/.

ICD-10 - ORPHA: An Interactive Complex Network Model for Brazilian Rare Diseases

A disease is considered rare if it has a low prevalence. It is estimated that around 400 million people worldwide have a rare disease, including 15 million in Brazil. Consequently, it became a public health priority for the World Health Organization and the Brazilian Health Ministry. In 2014, the Brazilian government launched a national policy regarding the care for rare patients’, the Ordinance nº199. The national politic defines guidelines, procedures, and descriptions of rare disease codes to provide access and diagnosis in the public health system to reduce mortality and improve patient’s quality of life. Diseases are identified according to the International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision, a widely used terminology in this context. However, there are also different terminologies to codify a rare disease, such as the ORPHAcode provided by Orphanet. This paper proposes a complex network model using the terminologies’ relationship to show that the International Classification of Diseases 10th Revision may be generic for diagnosing rare Brazilian patients. Moreover, there is no perfect nomenclature to define rare diseases, but each context has a better application. So, mapping the relationship between each terminology is fundamental for creating consistent semantic relationships in biomedical ontologies, providing a functional environment for carrying out tasks involving more than one terminology.

An Introduction to Radical Biocracy: A relational, autonomous approach to decision-making towards emergent and symbiotic design

Abstract Any system health work must look at decision-making because decisions propagate throughout a system, shaping system dynamics. Usually, human decision-making is conducted from an individualist, objectivist perspective. What happens when we use an approach based on the radical relationality of Radical Participatory Design and Relational Design? This is the fourth paper in a series of papers which introduced Radical Participatory Design in the first two papers and Relational Design in the third paper. In this fourth paper, we explore the decision-making dynamics in Radical Participatory Design and Relational Design projects. We use the term political ecology to speak about the power dynamics within any ecological system – a geographical population, a community, an ecosystem, and so forth. We analyze the political ecologies of individualist decision-making models. Then we explore how to embody a relational ontology within decision-filled human ecosystems and how a relational way of being changes decision-making. Referring to biology, we discuss ingredients for relational decision-making – relationality, emergent design principles, and autonomy. Those ingredients can lead to emergent and symbiotic design. Emergent design refers to design that emerges from consistently following a few basic principles. Symbiotic design occurs over time when deeply, relationally embedded entities retain autonomy and indirectly evolve to create a design that would not have occurred through an intentional design process. We then introduce Radical Biocracy as a type of decision-making model where decisions are not deliberated by groups or team members but emerge from the relationally autonomous choices and actions of individuals.

Propriedades e relações: uma leitura pós-antropocêntrica

Abstract This article explores the philosophical postulates that are generating a whole series of transformations at the ethical, legal and political levels. In order to trace back the philosophical conditions of possibility of such change, it will study the scope of the theory of relations and the theory of properties. After its exhaustive analysis, it concludes that the theory of relations has a greater explanatory and operational scope than the theory of properties. After exploring the moral justification of sensocentrist and biocentrist arguments, it invites to the cultivation of non-destructive relations with any entity, strengthening a relational ontology as a way out of the current ecological crisis.

Opacity, Transparency, and the Ethics of Affective Computing

Human opacity is the intrinsic quality of unknowability of human beings with respect to machines. The descriptive relationship between humans and machines, which captures how much information one can gather about the other, can be explicated using an opacity-transparency relationship. This relationship allows us to describe and normatively evaluate a spectrum of opacity where humans and machines may be either opaque or transparent. In this paper, we argue that the advent of Affective Computing (AC) has begun to shift the ideal position of humans on this spectrum towards greater transparency, while much of this technology is shifting towards opacity. We explore the implications of this shift with regard to the affective information of humans and how the threat to human opacity by AC systems has various adverse repercussions, such as infringement of one's autonomy, deception, manipulation, and increased anxiety. There are also distributive consequences that expose vulnerable groups to unjustified burdens and reduce them to mere profiles. We further provide an assessment of current AC technology, which follows the descriptive relationship between humans and machines from the lens of opacity and transparency. Finally, we foresee and address three possible objections to our claims. These are the beneficence of AC systems, their relation to privacy, and their restrictive capacity to capture human affects. Through these arguments, the paper aims to bring attention to the ontological relationship between humans and machines from the perspective of opacity and transparency while emphasizing on the gravity of the ethical concerns raised by their threat to human opacity.

PRE-SCIENTIFIC AND SCIENTIFIC THEORIES OF HUMAN DREAM: AN AFRICAN PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVE

The concept and attitude towards human dream and what it means, mutates between the prescientific and scientific views. The pre-scientific view, basically, believes that dreams are possible channels by which God talks to humans. On the other hand, the scientific view, in general, holds that dreams are purely human psychic activity with no relation whatsoever to divine messages. The question is; what about African philosophical perspectives? This paper hypothesizes that while most African traditional societies embrace the pre-scientific view of dreams, African philosophy is much more complex in regards to the concept of dreams. This is because; African philosophy embraces some elements of the pre-scientific as well as the scientific views. Centrally, African philosophical perspective is based on African ontology, which underscores the ontological relationship between beings. In this ontology, humans are related to God, ancestors, nature, and fellow humans. Dreams can only be understood from this perspective. Thus, African philosophy does not insulate divine interventions from human dreams and as well incorporates human mental consciousness.

ОБЕСПЕЧЕНИЕ МУЛЬТИМОДАЛЬНОСТИ В ТУРИСТИЧЕСКИХ МАРШРУТАХ НА ПРИМЕРЕ ВОЛГОГРАДСКОЙ ОБЛАСТИ

The paper uses a systematic approach in creating the proposed tourism system. The use of ontology has made it possible to develop a classification of tourist sites in the Volgograd region. The concepts of tourist bus routes have been developed on the basis of classification and established ontological relationships. According to the level of transport use and its interaction, it is proposed to divide the concepts of tourist routes into micro-levels, meso-levels and macro-levels of the tourism system being developed. A heat map of the transport accessibility of the Volgograd region has been compiled, which made it possible to ensure the use of different types of transport in multimodal tourist routes. Multimodal routes of tourist buses have been developed, technical, operational and economic indicators of the functioning of the buses used have been determined.

A Discussion on Relationality and Relational Ontology in the Discipline of IR

Dünya siyasetini anlamak ve açıklamak amacıyla hangi aktörlerin arasındaki ne tür ilişkilerin öncelikli olarak incelenmesi gerektiği konusu disiplinin kuruluşundan bu yana Uluslararası İlişkiler Kuramları literatüründe merkezi bir tartışma olagelmiştir. Bir ontolojik iddia olarak ilişkilerin aktörlerden veya birimlerden önce geldiği ve dünya siyasetinin malzemesi olarak incelediğimiz her şeyin aslında birer ilişkiler bütünü olduğu ilişkisel ontoloji veya ilişkisellik kavramı ise, sosyoloji ve felsefe gibi sosyal bilimlerin diğer alanlarında daha uzun süredir var olmasına ragmen, Uluslararası İlişkiler’de ancak 1990’ların sonlarından itibaren gündeme gelmeye başlamıştır. Bu çalışmada ilişkisellik kavramının Uluslararası İlişkiler disiplini açısından ne ifade ettiği ve disipline -eğer getirdiyse- nasıl bir yenilik getirdiğinin sorgulanması amaçlanmaktadır. Bu bağlamda, ilk bölümde sosyal bilimlerin diğer alanlarında ortaya çıkmış olan tözcü (substantive) ve ilişkisel (relational) yaklaşımlar arasındaki farklara değinilmiştir. Ikinci bölüm, ilişkiselliğin Uluslararası İlişkiler içindeki yolculuğuna odaklanarak, disipline tanıştırılmasından günümüze bu kavramın dünya siyaseti tartışmaları içinde hangi araştırmacılar tarafından ve nasıl çalışılageldiğini incelemektedir. Üçüncü bölüm, ilişkiselliğin farklı Uluslararası İlişkiler kuramları içinde bir yeri olup olmadığını sorgulamakta ve aynı zamanda bir kavram olarak ilişkisellikten bahsetmeyen kuramların içinde ilişkilere dair zaten var olan varsayımları ele almaktadır. Dördüncü bölüm, ilişkiselliğe dair var olan az sayıda eleştiriye de değinerek, bu kavrama birkaç yeni eleştiri getirmekte ve ilerlemek için muhtemel tartışma alanları veya çözüm önerileri sunmaktadır. Çalışma, makale boyunca yapılan tartışmaları ve çıkarımları ortaya koyan sonuç bölümü ile sonlandırılmaktadır.

A felszabadulás ígérete. A szubjektivitás problémája Agamben és Badiou Szent Pál-értelmezésében

In this paper, I will explore the problem of subjectivity in the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, based on their interpretations of Saint Paul. In Agamben’s reading, St. Paul’s letters have a messianic structure that can be linked to a specific form of subjectivation, closely related to the concept of “vocation” or “calling” (klētós). In Badiou’s case, the political universality introduced in the Pauline letters is explained through the ontological relation between the concepts of event and truth. In Agamben’s and Badiou’s thought, the concepts of subject and subjectivity appear in a different conceptual framework, despite sharing the same starting point. The Badiouian approach aims to present the messianic motivation found in the writings of St. Paul from an ontological and political perspective through which the concepts of event and subject are related. Agamben situates the messianic klētós on a political basis from which he connects the linguistic expressions of the Pauline letters to the problem of subjectivization. Despite their different ontological framework, Agamben and Badiou offer an emancipatory political-philosophical perspective whose conceptual constitution is both the universality of the event and the ‘remainder’ (resto) of subjectivity based on difference through a specific linguistic expression, the hōs mē.

Jean-Luc Nancy: przyjemność (w) dekonstrukcji

The article deals primarily with the concept of pleasure in Jean-Luc Nancy’s thought. It occurs in many texts by the philosopher and connects with key concepts of his deconstructive project: the body, relational ontology and the writing. For Nancy, pleasure is, among other things, a particular somatic experience, the effect of peculiar writing practice, and finally, the experience of non-identity of a singular plural subject. The distinctive feature of pleasure (in various conceptualizations) is the opening that it makes every time, which Nancy derives from his deconstructive considerations on the works of Freud, Kant and Barthes. In the thesis, Nancy’s revised concept of pleasure as an opening is also referenced to Derrida’s thought in order to analyse the general relations between pleasure and deconstruction and to consider how deconstruction can be a source of pleasure.

Allegories of Immersion

Fish Night, an episode of LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS (S01E12, 2019) based on a 1982 short story by Joe R. Lansdale, can be interpreted as an allegory of the impossibility of immersive experience: if real, it is deadly, because the images are no longer such or ghosts but living beings present in a shared environmental habitat, acting with but also against the subject, in turn no longer a spectator. Comparing the story and film, and ancient ekphrastic literature, I discuss, in a trans-medial imaginary genealogical perspective, the symptoms of this cultural topos and of the regressive desire for immersion and for transparent immediacy that shapes and drives it, dwelling in particular on the ambivalent phenomenological and ontological relations between living bodies, pictures and media as deep time-bending.

Ontological Relations of the 1945 Basic Act as the Constitution with Pancasila as the State Ideology

This article discusses the relationship between Pancasila and the UUD 1945 as a constitution and laws, implementing regulations and policies to see its ontological gaps. The discussion focused on the constitutional phenomenon, which must elaborate on constructing the 1945 Basic Act and Pancasila. This article aims to see the dimensions of legal ontology related to the understanding and practice of justice in the country and state. The method used is to apply a content analysis approach, which identifies patterns, themes, or meanings that arise from the concept material contained in Pancasila and the 1945 Basic Act. Hail from this research is found ontological problems that need deeper attention. Given the overly broad ontological nature, further research is needed to identify deeper problems. This research has significant significance because it can be a marker of problems at the philosophical level that need attention. Empowerment.

Divine Pedagogy in the Face of Educational Crisis. On the Approach of Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI

Joseph Ratzinger – Benedict XVI, one of the greatest thinkers of mankind and the greatest Pope-theologian in the history of the modern Church, has devoted much attention to a critical analysis of the spirit of the age and the spiritual condition of modern people, living as if God did not exist. The Pope’s diagnosis is unequivocal and utterly pessimistic. He writes openly about the spiritual void, the drama of the times and even the tunnel in which humanity has found itself. At the core of this condition, according to Benedict XVI, there are two postmodern phenomena: relativism and secularism, leading people, above all young people, into spiritual regress and deformation. In the face of these threats and their disastrous consequences, the Pope from Germany proposes that the spiritual development of young people become the most urgent challenge and priority task to be carried out jointly by all the different groups of educators: parents, teachers, pedagogues, catechists, and the clergy. Of the many tasks and remedies needed to achieve success, which Benedict XVI outlined for educators in his speeches and writings, three aspects are particularly fundamental: personalism, theo- and Christocentrism, and integrity and reference to conscience. The perception of a young person as a subject through his or her ontological relationship with the living God revealed in Jesus Christ and the formation of a conscience, through which a young person may take responsibility for himself or herself and co-responsibility for others, guarantee authentic education and can restore hope to contemporary people and the world.

Relations, territories, and politics of infrastructural regionalism

ABSTRACT In this afterword to the special issue on ‘Water, Governance, and the Dynamics of Infrastructural Regionalism’, I reflect on three achievements of regional infrastructures that are common to all the articles. First, I discuss the relational ontologies and epistemologies that the authors use to characterise the multifaceted connections between humans and non-humans, as well as the imaginaries that inform the framings of regional infrastructure. I then discuss the territorialising achievements of infrastructuring and regionalising processes that involve the aligning of hydrological and jurisdictional boundaries, the hybridisation of ways of knowing, and the establishing of formal and informal relationships to address fragmented conditions. Finally, I summarise the varying forms of contested and consensual politics that are rife with power dynamics and social inequalities. I conclude by suggesting some future directions for infrastructural regionalism scholarship.

Experiencing Transformative Learning during Participatory Needs Assessment of a Public School: Journeys and Arrivals to Relational Ontology(ies)

This paper discusses experiences from school-based needs assessment within a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project aimed at facilitating quality education in public schools of rural Nepal. Being often a first stage in the process of research-action, Participatory Needs Assessment (PNA) offers space for community members’ perceptions and attitudes toward their collective needs. In this light, this paper takes evidence from the first and the second authors’ Ph.D. experiences, under the supervision of the third and the fourth authors to initiate PNA of a school. Also, incorporating the reflections from the fifth author as a critical friend, it observes the political, epistemological, ethical, and methodological challenges of doing such assessments; the challenges of involving all the stakeholders in identifying problems, and the transformative possibilities the approach inherently brings within it. On the whole, the paper reflects how, despite manifold conflicting interests of the multi-group stakeholders, relational ontology(ies) emerged in the cyclical and spiral process.

T Follicular Helper Cell Heterogeneity

T follicular helper (Tfh) cells specialize in helping B cells and are therefore critical contributors to the generation of humoral immunity. Tfh cells aid immunoglobulin class-switch recombination and support the germinal center response, thereby promoting immunoglobulin affinity maturation and the generation of humoral immune memory. Although their primary function is to promote B cell responses, Tfh cells also display phenotypic and functional diversity determined by the immunological and spatial contexts from which they emerge. We review recent advances in understanding the heterogeneity within Tfh cell subsets along with their differentiation and migratory trajectory, the phenotypes they adopt, their ontological relationships with one another, and their function in their respective environments.

Adolescent Relatedness Through the Lens of Unitary Caring Theory.

Caring as a central focus within nursing has evolved into a relational ontology to guide practice and enhance well-being. Caring praxis has the potential to address the complexities of adolescent development and to allow for authentic engagement, breaking down the barriers of resistance to care. It is clear from the alarming statistics related to the prevalence of anxiety and depression in adolescents that teens are in distress. The authors in this article examine the construct of relatedness in adolescence through the lens of the theory of unitary caring and propose a trans-theoretical transdisciplinary model of relatedness that informs adolescent practice.

Géographicité, material agency and the thickness of the Earth: rediscovering Eric Dardel beyond ‘nature/culture’ dualisms

This paper reassesses and rediscovers the intellectual legacy of French geographer Eric Dardel (1899–1967). First discovered by geographers in the 1970s and 1980s, Dardel’s book L’Homme et la Terre was considered as a work predating alternatively humanistic approaches and postmodern critiques of positivism, which justifies why it passed substantially unperceived when it was first published in 1952. Yet, most of these authors have manifestly only read that book despite Dardel’s production was much larger, labelling Dardel as a ‘phenomenologist’ in a quite reductive way. Drawing upon recent literature on material agency and on phenomenology/post-phenomenology in geography, and based on the analysis of Dardel’s complete body of work, I argue that the contribution of the French geographer cannot be reduced to matters of phenomenology and subjective perception. To this end, I especially focus on Dardel’s references to the 19th-century tradition of Naturphilosophie that argued for a consubstantiality of ‘humankind’ and ‘nature’. Hence, I show how Dardel’s willingness to take seriously the materiality and agency of ‘the Earth’ through his notion of géographicité [geographicity or geographicalness] can give new and original insights to current geographies dealing with materiality, affect, human-nature hybridity and relational ontologies. Questioning dualisms such as humankind/nature, subject/object and nature/culture, early geographical understandings of the planet as a complex living being can foster the relevance of geography for both the ‘material turn’ advocating for plural agencies and for critical debates denying the principle of human supremacy over the planet.