Ontological Spaces Research Articles

IR, climate politics, and change: opportunities for productive engagement?

‘Change’ or ‘transformation’ are longstanding preoccupations of both International Relations (IR) and global climate change politics scholarship. Yet, the two fields largely occupy independent axiological, epistemological, normative, and ontological spaces that have led to misunderstandings, mutual criticisms, and a lack of serious engagement on these questions. The result is missed opportunities to transform IR, misdiagnoses of political dynamics of climate change, and, perversely, the limited influence of political analysis on wider climate change scholarship. This article identifies understandings of change and transformation relevant to both fields and introduces a productive epistemological and ontological shift for analyzing and normatively engaging with change in the face of uncertainty. It then introduces practical research strategies for policy-relevant and forward-looking scholarship that moves from explaining change to identifying causal logics and dynamic processes that can reinforce (or undermine) change and transformation. It concludes with illustrative analyzes of trajectories and possible limits of two macro policy changes with transformative potential: the 1.5-degree Celsius aspirational target in the Paris Agreement, and the proliferation of ‘net zero’ policies around the world.

The concept of wrapping and its ontological character among the Maya

A textile with its threads, its weft, and warp, for the western ontology, is a simple utilitarian object or a body adornment. This study will discuss the wrapping among the Maya, starting from concepts present in ancient and contemporary Maya thought to identify the ontological character of some ceremonial textiles present in these societies. Based on an approach proposed by the ontological archaeology, I will discuss the conceptual proximity between the terms pix (to wrap, to cover) and pixan (soul, or something that is received from the other world), to think of the wrap as an element of articulation between the two ontological spaces, allowing the presence of beings and entities of the cosmos in Maya cities of the Classic and contemporary periods.
 By generating the materialization and performance of these beings, wraps create relational fields that activate these entities temporarily in ordinary space, establishing effective contact with the Maya cosmos. A brief analysis of these Textile Beings present during the Classic Period will be discussed as a case study, in order to consider such a conceptual proposal.

Agential layering, the absurd and the grind in game-playing

This paper attempts to provide a reflection on Nguyen’s (2020) book, Games: Agency as Art. It demonstrates how games provide new ontological spaces and ways of being by focusing on the concept of a...

Environmental governance: Broadening ontological spaces for a more livable world

This paper contributes to global debates on environmental governance by drawing on recent ontological scholarship to ask: What would it mean to ontologically engage the concept of environmental governance? By examining the ontological underpinnings of three environmental governance domains (land, water, biodiversity), we find that dominant contemporary environmental governance concepts and policy instruments are grounded in a modernist ontology which actively shapes the world, making certain aspects and relationships visible while invisibilizing others. We then survey ethnographic and other literature to highlight how such categories and their relations have been conceived otherwise and the implications of breaking out of a modernist ontology for environmental governance. Lastly, we argue that answering our opening question requires confronting the coloniality woven into the environmental governance project and consider how to instead embrace ontological pluralism in practice. In particular, we examine what taking seriously the right to self-determination enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) could mean for acknowledging Indigenous ontologies as systems of governance in their own right; what challenges and opportunities exist for recognizing and translating ontologies across socio-legal regimes; and how embracing the dynamism and hybridity of ontologies might complicate or advance struggles for material and cognitive justice.

Forming Cognitive Maps of Ontologies Using Interactive Visualizations

Ontology datasets, which encode the expert-defined complex objects mapping the entities, relations, and structures of a domain ontology, are increasingly being integrated into the performance of challenging knowledge-based tasks. Yet, it is hard to use ontology datasets within our tasks without first understanding the ontology which it describes. Using visual representation and interaction design, interactive visualization tools can help us learn and develop our understanding of unfamiliar ontologies. After a review of existing tools which visualize ontology datasets, we find that current design practices struggle to support learning tasks when attempting to build understanding of the ontological spaces within ontology datasets. During encounters with unfamiliar spaces, our cognitive processes align with the theoretical framework of cognitive map formation. Furthermore, designing encounters to promote cognitive map formation can improve our performance during learning tasks. In this paper, we examine related work on cognitive load, cognitive map formation, and the use of interactive visualizations during learning tasks. From these findings, we formalize a set of high-level design criteria for visualizing ontology datasets to promote cognitive map formation during learning tasks. We then perform a review of existing tools which visualize ontology datasets and assess their interface design towards their alignment with the cognitive map framework. We then present PRONTOVISE (PRogressive ONTOlogy VISualization Explorer), an interactive visualization tool which applies the high-level criteria within its design. We perform a task-based usage scenario to illustrate the design of PRONTOVISE. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of PRONTOVISE and its use of the criteria towards the design of interactive visualization tools which help us develop understanding of the ontological space within ontology datasets.

Lex biomedica: concept, nature and ontology

The article is devoted to the study and explanation of the meaning, nature, structure, features and ontology of extra-legal regulation in the field of healthcare and medicine (lex biomedica). The authors explain the concept and structure of lex biomedica. The article shows other ontological spaces of the bioethical order associated with the lex biomedica normative space; the content of the subject-object area of lex biomedica regulation is described in detail. The article describes and explains the features of the interactions between the space of legal regulation and the space of extra-legal regulation in the field of healthcare. The authors refer to the concept of "bio-law".

Figures of youth: on the very object of Youth Studies

ABSTRACT ‘Youth’ as a social category is used and abused in all manner of ways across an array of fields, platforms, discourses and spaces, Youth Studies notwithstanding. When we talk about ‘young people’ sometimes we seem to be referring to different phenomena, depending upon our political interests, theoretical perspectives and research methods. This article interrogates how the concept of ‘youth’ is figuratively put to work. By suggesting different figures of youth, and inviting suggestions for more, I propose that tracing how they are situated in different ontological spaces can develop a clearer conception of our research object(s) and help reduce confusion and the possibility that we are talking past each other. The incomplete picture I want to paint of figures of youth, in quite broad-brush strokes, all inter-relate in something of a feedback loop, a material-semiotic assemblage that forms powerful affects for the ways that ‘youth’ is brought into being, how youth are researched, governed, co-opted and exploited.

The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games

Abstract This paper will examine three contemporary video games – Undertale, The magic circle and Pony Island – with an eye towards delineating the ways in which their unique storyworlds and ontological structures align with recent trends in unnatural narratology. Specifically, these games contain interstitial diegetic spaces, and empower the player to move through ‘cracks’ in the façade of the fictional world by acting as a metaphorical programmer, manipulating game files and other extradiegetic components. The metaleptic processes enabled by these actions expose aspects of the respective storyworlds which have been deliberately concealed. Consequently, the games in question literalize existing theories regarding our projection and cognitive exploration of fictional worlds, as they are singular in their capacity for experimentation and transgression of established ontological frameworks.

Toward a Social Ontology for Science Education: Introducing Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages

This essay’s main objective is to develop a theoretical, ontological basis for critical, social justice-oriented science education. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of assemblages, rhizomes, and arborescent structures, this article challenges authoritarian institutional practices, as well as the subject of these practices, and offers a way for critical-social justice-oriented science educators and students to connect with sociopolitical contexts. Through diagramming institutional and community relationships using DG’s theory of assemblages, we envision new ontological spaces that bridge social and material entities. A conceptualization of science education through DG’s philosophy of rhizomes and assemblages allows educators to merge critical, post-foundational perspectives with questions of ontology: not just what exists, but what could exist in terms of human social organizations (governments and community groups), inorganic matter, microorganisms, and plant/animal populations.

Between Body and Spirit: The Liminality of Pedagogical Relationships

This article explores the pedagogical, transformative aspects of education as a relation, viewing such transformation as occurring in the liminal space between body and spirit. In order to explore this liminal space more thoroughly, the article first outlines a case for why liminality is of educational and not only of pedagogical concern, building on James Conroy's notion of the liminal imagination and his emphasis on the importance of metaphor for calling our attention to the ontological spaces that make up educational practice. I then use this metaphor both substantively and methodologically, offering a reading of Clarice Lispector's novel The Stream of Life as a performance of the liminal imagination in its attempt to put into focus the embodied and transcendent aspects of becoming, both of which I see as central to defining what is pedagogical about human existence. The article then turns to developing how different metaphors may be mobilised to signify the particularly relational quality of becoming, drawing on Luce Irigaray's work to explore more closely the corporeal and spiritual aspects of becoming in relation. I then turn my attention to a more fulsome discussion of the significance of approaching pedagogical relationships in education in this way and what this signifies for the teacher-student encounter in particular.

Oscar Wilde’s artificiality and the logic of genuine pluralism

Oscar Wilde’s artificial, nonsensical aesthetic is really a magnificently rigorous and just pluralism. His artificiality of style and wit presents the serious and un‐artificial possibility of things’ being essentially otherwise than they are understood to be in any given standpoint. His aesthetic impact itself consists in a fresh opening of essential or constitutive or ontological spaces or standpoints. But this opening of spaces is thoroughly self‐canceling, and so is also a validation of essential spaces exactly as they are. This validation, then, involves self‐canceling recognition of mutually exclusive “spaces.” The principle at work is that constitutive difference between standpoints involves the meaninglessness of the organizing categories of each position to the others. A position that aims to understand and communicate with incompatible positions must therefore recognize the genuine meaninglessness of its own claims to them, and vice‐versa. In this way, paradoxically, mutually exclusive positions can be related without obscuring their mutual exclusivity. Wilde’s nonsensical aesthetic, as expressed in both his fictional and critical works, is exactly this kind of paradoxical coordination.

Rethinking Social Divisions: Some Notes towards a Theoretical Framework

This paper attempts to provide a framework for theorising the social divisions of gender, ethnicity and class in terms of parameters of differentiation and inequality which lie at the heart of ‘the social’. The paper argues that there are common parameters to the social divisions of gender, ethnicity, ‘race’ (and class) in terms of categories of difference and positionality. The paper explores the distinctive ontological spaces or domains of gender and ethnos and argues that their study must be undertaken in local and specific contexts paying attention to their articulation. The articulation of the different social processes at the experiential, inter-subjective, organisational and representational levels produces specific social outcomes. Finally, a schematic outline of some of these articulations is presented.