Relational Ontology Research Articles

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.

Metamodernism: A Multispecies Approach to Hermeneutics

Abstract This paper discusses the merits of the multispecies approach, presented by Jason Ā. Josephson Storm, in his book Metamodernism. By offering a compelling analysis of the causes that led human sciences to fall into the opposition between ontological and mind-dependent interpretation of phenomena, Josephson Storm attempts to solve the resulting impasse by examining how hermeneutical processes result from an active dialectical relation between living organisms and the contextual regularities the environment offers them. Thanks to its capacity to prevent essentialism, while at the same time allowing a form of a relational and pragmatic ontology of the ‘objects’ under research scrutiny, I argue that this method of analysis of social categories can represent a valuable tool for scholars of religion.

Формирование лексического модуля прикладной онтологии для её обучения

The complexity of developing ontologies is associated with their learning, which involves the automation of solving problems related to the extraction of ontological concepts and relationships from natural language texts. For a created ontology used in an information system, there will most likely be a need to expand its conceptual system due to the complication or change in data processing. Subsequent application of text analysis to discover new concepts and in-corporate them into the ontology, that is, linking them with existing concepts, will require identifying the latter in sen-tences of natural language texts. This paper considers the problem of automating the formation of the lexical module of applied ontology, which includes formalized representations of ontological concepts in natural language texts. A brief review of existing works devoted to the use of lexical information about ontology components in solving problems related to the analysis of textual data is presented. The ways of using the OntoLex-Lemon model for determining the structure of lexical representations of ontology concepts are considered. A procedure is proposed for the formation of lexical representations based on the analysis of texts in the subject area, taking into account the case when concepts have names consisting of several words. The results of applying the obtained module for the automatic formation of a training set of a neural network language model used in the ontology learning task for discovering new concepts in the corpus of subject texts are presented.

Jumping scales and producing peripheries: Farmers’ adaptation strategies in crises

Resilience has gathered significant attention from economic geographers, yet their focus has primarily centered on economic outcomes at the regional level. This approach often overlooks the intricate micro-processes and lived experiences during crises, assuming that individual resilience can be understood solely through macro-level economic observations. We argue that comprehending the questions of resilience ‘to what means’ and ‘to what ends’ requires that we acknowledge the importance of social reproduction and daily practices. Through semi-structured interviews with mink farmers in Denmark and by using the concepts of spaces of dependence and spaces of engagement, we first highlight the everyday practices and broader social structures that individuals aim to preserve and reproduce. Second, we draw attention to the application of a relational spatial ontology in resilience studies by discussing cross-scalar networks of individuals as an adaptation strategy. In so doing, we contribute to the resilience literature in economic geography by highlighting that resilience for individuals entails the reproduction of everyday practices. We also draw attention to the consequences of network detachment for individual livelihoods. Thus unveiling how peripherality is shaped and re/produced, rather than given, through the evolving networks of ‘left behind’ people in ‘left behind’ places.

‘Women helping women’: Deploying gender in US counterinsurgency wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

Central to the goal of ‘hearts and minds’ counterinsurgency is the need for knowledge, understanding and influence in relation to local populations. Building on feminist scholarship on counterinsurgency, the article focuses on the ‘female engagement’ work undertaken by four programmes developed by the US military between 2003 and 2014. The article offers three key arguments. First, it maintains that the gendered subjectivities of Iraqi and Afghan women and US female counterinsurgents are constructed as strategic assets and as vulnerable subjects. Second, these programmes reveal the extent to which gendered counterinsurgency is constituted and regulated by emotional and embodied norms and rules for both female soldiers and civilians. Third, it suggests that the discursive construction of ‘winning hearts and minds’ works to render less visible the violence of gendered counterinsurgency practices. Although gendered counterinsurgency mobilizes a relational ontology predicated on the emotional labour required for developing knowledge of the Iraqi and Afghan ‘other’, female engagement activities cannot escape the logic of instrumental reasoning within which they are located. Ultimately, recognizing the policy of female engagement as central to forms of knowledge production reveals the extent to which the violences of war rely on a complex set of gendered and affective relations.

Mobilizing relational ontology: meeting the pluriversal challenge in tourism studies

ABSTRACT Philosophical and theoretical research on tourism is ever more pertinent in an age of increased uncertainty, manifold vulnerabilities, and determination to promote justice, fairness, and equality. The pluriversal challenge facing tourism and tourism studies, that is, the necessity for polycentric, inclusive, and equitably participatory being, doing, and knowing, suggests that these transitional times require an ontology that can assist with understanding the entangled complexities of being and becoming vis-à-vis tourism. Relational ontology is thus presented as a crucial lens for comprehending the ethical, environmental, political, social, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that emerge uniquely through tourism as relationalities. This paper argues that relational ontology not only accommodates but also discloses pluriversality and the ontological multiple, and that it can facilitate not universal but relational understandings, which can coexist, enrich, and promote human flourishing through tourism.

Mutual Doings: Exploring Affectivity in Participatory Methodologies

The aim of this paper is to explore the affective implications of working with participatory methodologies within the context of sexuality education. For this exploration, a feminist posthumanist approach is put to work, building on a relational ontology and the notions of affectivity, assemblage and environmentality. Drawing from a practice-based research project concerning sexuality education conducted together with teachers in Swedish secondary schools, the analysis puts forward how the research assemblage navigates and manages affective conditions in ways that produce, allow and exclude certain feelings. With (dis)trust, uncertainty, frustration, laughter and shame, the assemblage made bodies act and become in specific ways. Thus, the analysis shows how participatory and practice-based research become moulded by power relations and intense flows of desire working together. This raises questions about how participatory methodologies within an ontological view of interdependence afford to manage affective intensities to move in certain directions of socially just sexuality education.

An Appraisal of Christoph Schwöbel’s Trinitarian Theology of Creation in Dialogue with Natural Sciences

Abstract In this article I explore Christoph Schwöbel (1955–2021)’s distinctive contributions to the ongoing dialogue between religion and science in the following three perspectives. First, he emphasizes the need of a more consistently trinitarian theology of creation in dialogue with sciences which is expected to rectify widespread one-sided approaches. Second, he advocates for the continued importance of having philosophy as theology’s dialogue partner along with natural sciences. Finally, he places significant emphasis on the ethic of createdness in the face of ecological crisis. After critical as well as appreciative analyses of each of Schwöbel’s contributions, I make constructive proposals for the future discussion, in terms of more direct engagement with natural sciences, fuller explication of the ontology of communicative relations, and extended application of his ethic of createdness to the emerging issues concerning recent technological innovations.

Capitalism and the state: A new materialist perspective

This article considers how the relational, post-anthropocentric and monist ontology of the new materialisms can inform a theory of the contemporary capitalist state, and how this perspective offers a distinctive resolution of some of the negative consequences of a capitalist mode of production. It summarises Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of capitalism as an international/ecumenical social formation, founded upon a ‘capitalist axiomatic’: namely, the free flows of capital and labour required for the everyday workings of the capitalist market. The state is a material realisation of this capitalist axiomatic. The article then undertakes a more-than-human analysis of capitalist production and markets, supply and demand, in terms of affects and assemblages. The article invokes the metaphor of a ‘black hole’ to suggest that capitalism is not merely exploitative of workers, but a formation from which neither worker nor entrepreneur can escape once a participant. Furthermore, it is these more-than-human affects that produce undesirable consequences including uncertainty, waste and social inequalities. This second analysis further refines a monist understanding of the capitalist state and suggests immediate measures to counter the unintended consequences of a market economy.

The humanity of the non-human –– Themes of artificial subjectivity in Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun

In this article we discuss themes of artificial subjectivity in Ishiguro's novel Klara and the Sun. We first present a thematic overview, and some reflections upon subjectivity. The analysis proceeds in four steps pertaining to perspectives on artificial subjectivity and the narrative construction of human dignity: (1) who is human, (2) where does the heart lie, (3) the dialectical creation of the heart, and (4) reflections on subjectivity and personhood. Finally, we summarize the views suggested and emphasize their relevance to society's understanding of humanity and the non-human. We also conclude that relational ontologies are more suitable to understand subjectivity and personhood, in particular in cases of interaction between the human and non-human.

유아 교사의 놀이 성찰에서 나타난 전문성 탐색

Based on the perspective of relational ontology, this study attempted to explore the expertise that appeared in the play reflection of early childhood teachers. To this end, interviews with two early childhood teachers were conducted, and the meaning of expertise was explored, focusing on play that showed the teacher's expertise well. First, in becoming a snail, the curriculum execution ability to maintain a long breath of play and the ethics of each other's responsibility appeared. Next, it was found that watering dogs and stepping stones that attract children have a sensitivity to learning that teachers who apply the curriculum to children who meet physical properties are everywhere. Finally, the flowing rainbow scarf play showed a sense of recognizing the flow of play and flexibility in the action of power in the classroom. Based on this, it was discussed that not only intellectual but also practical skills work together, so experience is needed to improve teachers' practical expertise, that teachers' learning is an internal-action with ontological and ethical characteristics, and that personal efforts and educational conditions should be improved.

O3PO: A domain ontology for offshore petroleum production plants

The challenge of integrating data from many data sources has persisted as an issue in several industry areas. With the evolution of technology in the upstream petroleum sector (i.e., exploration and production), the petroleum business must contend with technological silos from diverse service providers and suffers from the associated waste of time to locate data and information throughout siloed databases. Based on a thorough compilation of industry-oriented requirements in the form of use cases and competency questions, this document defines a domain ontology for defining entities in offshore petroleum production plants. The objective is to develop a uniform and clearly defined reference vocabulary to aid engineers and information technology professionals in labeling and relating production plant monitoring, simulation measures, and facilities. BFO is the top-level ontology, while GeoCore and a continuing version of the core ontology developed by the Industry Ontology Foundry (IOF) configure the middle-level ontologies. We have studied and combined several other resources to build the ontology, such as glossaries from the industry and related ontologies. The research resulted in a well-founded domain ontology that provides universals, defined classes, and relations that can be useful in several types of applications in the domain. We have demonstrated the utility of the ontology within an actual scenario in an offshore petroleum field in Brazil, where we conceived and applied the domain ontology. This study is a component of the PeTWIN project,22Petwin is an academic cooperation between UFRGS, UiO, and Libra, Equinor, and Shell companies (www.petwin.org). which looks at the best approaches for creating digital twins of offshore petroleum plants.

The Global Imperative for Higher Education: Cultivating Students’ Ontological Relationships to Multiscalar Spaces through Glonacal Agency

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the cause and treatment of global emergencies are bounded within a space (e.g., local communities, a country, or a region). This establishes a new purpose for higher education, namely to move from the notion that institutions must physically house students to that of cultivating students’ glonacal agency through the online learning environment. Such a model intrinsically motivates students to navigate the multiscalar spaces (i.e., global, national, and local spheres) as part of their higher education learning and to lead actions that do not subjugate the interests and rights of communities in diverse spaces. In serving the new purpose of higher education, online graduate education, particularly asynchronous comparative and international education courses, can play an imperative role. This essay, thus, establishes an ontological and pedagogical conceptualization of how comparative and international education can prepare students to develop glonacal agency by interrogating the concept of space and attending to students’ ontological sense of being in the context of education and agency development.

Schrödinger’s Fetus and Relational Ontology: Reconciling Three Contradictory Intuitions in Abortion Debates

Pro-life and pro-choice advocates battle for rational dominance in abortion debates. Yet, public polling (and general legal opinion) demonstrates the public’s preference for the middle ground: that abortions are acceptable in certain circumstances and during early pregnancy. Implicit in this, are two contradictory intuitions: (1) that we were all early fetuses, and (2) abortion kills no one. To hold these positions together, Harman and Räsänen have argued for the Actual Future Principle (AFP) which distinguishes between fetuses that will develop into persons and those that will never develop into persons. However intellectually ingenious their solutions are, they fail to account for a third intuition: that the death of a wanted fetus – e.g. through termination or miscarriage – is of moral significance. Not only is this practically important, but it is also supported by public opinion. The authors of this paper argue that relational ontology can modify the AFP to better account for all three intuitions. Furthermore, it further emphasizes the pivotal role of the pregnant person who relates to their own fetus in either personal or impersonal ways. Addressing the fundamental challenges of relational ontology, the authors defend the position that human personal identity is ultimately relational.

Specifying how intervention content is communicated: Development of a Style of Delivery Ontology.

Background: Investigating and enhancing the effectiveness of behaviour change interventions requires detailed and consistent specification of all aspects of interventions. We need to understand not only their content, that is the specific techniques, but also the source, mode, schedule, and style in which this content is delivered. Delivery style refers to the manner by which content is communicated to intervention participants. This paper reports the development of an ontology for specifying the style of delivery of interventions that depend on communication. This forms part of the Behaviour Change Intervention Ontology, which aims to cover all aspects of behaviour change intervention scenarios. Methods: The Style of Delivery Ontology was developed following methods for ontology development used in the Human Behaviour-Change Project, with seven key steps: 1) defining the scope of the ontology, 2) identifying key entities and developing their preliminary definitions by reviewing 100 behaviour change intervention evaluation reports and existing classification systems, 3) refining the ontology by piloting the ontology through annotations of 100 reports, 4) stakeholder review by eight behavioural science and public health experts, 5) inter-rater reliability testing through annotating 100 reports using the ontology, 6) specifying ontological relationships between entities, and 7) disseminating and maintaining the ontology. Results: The resulting ontology is a five-level hierarchical structure comprising 145 unique entities relevant to style of delivery. Key areas include communication processes, communication styles, and attributes of objects used in communication processes. Inter-rater reliability for annotating intervention evaluation reports was α=0.77 (good) for those familiar with the ontology and α=0.62 (acceptable) for those unfamiliar with it. Conclusions: The Style of Delivery Ontology can be used for both annotating and describing behaviour change interventions in a consistent and coherent manner, thereby improving evidence comparison, synthesis, replication, and implementation of effective interventions.

Rooted-South Feminisms: Disobedient Epistemologies and Transformative Politics

ABSTRACT Recent writing by Latin American feminists offers a unique political philosophy based on a novel and transformative analysis of the relationship between capitalism, coloniality, patriarchy, and terracide. Focusing on the work of Rita Segato, Julieta Paredes, Lélia Gonzalez, Raquel Gutiérrez-Aguilar, and Moira Millán, this paper introduces the term “Rooted-South feminism” and outlines its epistemic-rationality. I first show how these thinkers root their epistemological frame in the collective struggle of racialized women. Through this account I then make explicit the relational political ontology that grounds their thinking, paradigmatically expressed in the notions of “territory-body-land” and “terracide.” In describing how patriarchy functions as a system of domination that desensitises subjects to the suffering of the Other, I argue that Rooted-South feminists expose the structural relationship between capitalism, coloniality, violence against women, and the destruction of the Earth. Here, the feminine is conceived as a social function produced throughout the long histories of women. This “politics in a feminine key” uniquely understands the sphere of reproduction not simply as a vector of domination, but as the foundation for the liberation and regeneration of life in its totality. Rooted-South feminists propose an authentic historical pluralism engaged in the co-construction of an inhabited earth.

The Stones Cry Out and the Trees Talk: A Praxis of Epistemic Disobedience Toward a Settler Theology of Aurality

ABSTRACT Epistemic disobedience (Mignolo) to settler-coloniality in Canada requires conscientisation to Indigenous peoples’ stories and a decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres) in epistemology and ontology of relations (Tinker) between Indigenous and settler peoples. One group of primarily settler Christians on unceded and unsurrendered Algonquin/Anishnaabe territory engaged such a praxis, through Right Relations with their United Church in Ottawa, toward social healing (Lederach and Lederach) of colonial wounds, transformationally engaging in oral-aural praxis to relationally receive hi/stories of local Indigenous communities. Stan McKay, Cree elder and former moderator of the United Church of Canada, through Indigenous peoples’ understanding of creation invites a decolonial turn with hermeneutical listening in which one hears teachings of Jesus as cry of creation – such that even “the stones cry out” (Luke 19:40) and the trees teach – which has implications for a settler theology of aurality.