Ontological Shift Research Articles

Understanding Queer Oppression and Resistance in the Global Economy: Towards a Theoretical Framework for Political Economy

ABSTRACT The study of sexuality, especially queer sexuality, has occupied a historically marginal position within political economy. Where feminist scholars have addressed the topic, they have typically done so through the lens of women’s sexual labour and social reproduction and/or by framing sexual orientation and gender identity as a variable through which patterns of differentiation may occur. Most critical political economy ignores sexuality entirely. As a result, matters of queer oppression and resistance have not been systematically investigated or theorised. This paper addresses this gap by fusing together insights from the emergent ‘queering IPE’ literature with two other strands of scholarship that integrate queer concerns into the study of global capitalism: the ‘globalisation’ and ‘state-centric’ frames. Based on this, I propose a theoretical framework for understanding queer struggle and apply this to the analysis of LGBTI politics and activism in Ghana. The paper argues that queer oppression and resistance are important topics of inquiry in and of themselves in political economy. At the same time, a broader ontological shift is required to recognise the constitutive role of sexuality within political economic phenomena, which has potentially far-reaching implications for future research agendas within and beyond the study of queer politics.

Responding to anthropocentrism with anthropocentrism: the biopolitics of environmental personhood

ABSTRACT This article critically analyses the novelty of the legal personhood of nature and, in particular, whether it signals cracks in the anthropocentrism of Western law. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito, it contributes to the theorisation of environmental personhood by focusing on the biopolitical nature of personhood itself. It does so by engaging in a critical examination of the attribution of legal personality to the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand as the most detailed and sophisticated legislative example to date of legally personifying a natural thing. Working through three key conceptual terms in Foucault’s and Esposito’s work (population, personhood and immunisation), we demonstrate the way in which a biopolitical analysis raises questions about whether ascribing legal personhood to nature addresses anthropocentrism and its effects. We draw attention to the risk of ascribing legal personhood to nature, which is that, instead of signalling an ontological shift in the Western anthropocentric understandings of environment, it operates within and reinforces the dominant legal worldview – unless, that is, the granting of personhood to nature calls into question the dominant paradigm of personhood itself. The article concludes by suggesting alternative ways of developing human understandings of, and relationship with, nature.

Relational Culture: Beyond Prefigurative Politics

Social movements have been identified as a source of learning for collaborative governance network models, prefiguring “integrative governance” through their commitment to radical democracy. The nonprofit training institute Relational Uprising works directly with social movements and finds that despite their shared values and struggles, most movements are deeply challenged with sustaining these radical commitments within their own group interactions over time. Within movement communities, a culture of trusting relationships is needed to ensure resilience to the complexities of diversity and interdependency, without collapsing into suspicion, exclusion, and power struggles. Relational Uprising offers movements 1) a deconstruction of meta-narratives and embodied social behaviors they unwittingly inherit from the dominant culture; and 2) practices for generating a relational culture, which is characterized by the presence of key relational resources: sensitivity to connection, interdependence, and sustained inclusion. In this essay, we offer an explanation of our Relational Culture training framework and explore strengths and challenges within a specific movement example. We conclude that movements need a commitment to and a strategy for 1) uprooting dominant cultural values and behaviors and 2) replacing them with a relational culture that centers and protects relationships. Ultimately the Relational Culture framework helps movements undertake an ontological shift, which is necessary to avoid the inevitable pitfalls of operating within the habits and habitat of the dominant culture.

Now Turning to Our Tomorrows: Decolonial Futures in the Study of Islam

The emergence and growth of the decolonial movement in recent years has had a dramatic impact on universities around the world, inspiring new epistemic, political and ontological shifts across a wide range of disciplines. These shifts are broadly described as forming part of ‘the decolonial turn’ (Maldonado-Torres 2007: 261). As new generations of academics in the Study of Islam prepare to further the project of knowledge production in the context of post-Fallist universities, this paper seeks to address the following questions: What might it mean to decolonise the academic Study of Islam? How might decolonisation be consciously foregrounded as a future trajectory in the Study of Islam? After contextualising the academic study of Islam in South Africa and engaging with some of the major themes and concepts of decolonial scholarship, I review contemporary efforts to affect the decolonial turn in the Study of Islam through the initiation of summer schools and conferences. Applying what Sardar (2010) describes as ‘futures studies’ methodology, I propose ways to propel the decolonial turn as anticipatory intervention, based on an attempt to forecast the possible futures that await in the next five to ten years and beyond.

Somatic Transformations in the Context of Antropotechnogynesis at the Modern Stage

Purpose. The main purpose of the article is the analysis of the phenomenon and manifestations of the somatic transformations in the context of anthropo-technological evolution at the beginning of the XXI century. Theoretical basis. The author determines the understanding of the concept "somatic transformations" in the frames of anthropotechnogynesis is possible only on the base of integrative approach and combination of post-non-classical scientific paradigm methodology, theory of the technological development, ideas of trans-humanism, informative society concepts, and net technologies influence on the identity of the human being with robots in the sphere of bioethics and nanoethics, the ethics of new technologies and legal documents which are regulating the processes of technotransformation of the human being. Originality. The author has proved on the example of analysis of the somatic transformations own psychosomatics as he solves some important global in the context of anthropotechnogynesis that a person with help of technological enlargement of and branch problems, so he is trapped of alienation in the very crucial stage, loses the identity and crashes the corporeality in his self. Conclusions. As evidenced by the given analysis, at the modern stage the anthropotechnogynesis is followed by the large-scale quantitative and qualitative somatic transformations based on NBIC-convergence, as a result, a new anthropological subspecies – Homo technologicus appears. All these transformations are a regular stage of evolution, which confirms the thesis of the essential and functional connection of technology with the human body, which are in a relationship of "mutual provocation". In the base of the paradigmatic ontological and anthropological shift which has been on the modern stage, lies the idea of continuity of anthropotechnological co-evolution of the human body and its environment which projects itself in psychosomatic human structure, making a transformation program for better adaptation in technonanobeing. The convergence of human life and techno-existence is a platform for somatic transformations. They are divided into two main groups: intra-structural, substantial, related to techno-modification of the human body directly through biotechnology and genetic engineering, cyborgization, xenotransplantation, Hi-Hume connection with Hi-Tech and others, and external-contextual, when under the influence of pancommunication and hybridization the environment is increasingly mentalized and somatized, and modern technologies are gradually transformed into the social body of man.

Provenance Illusions and Elusive Paradata: When Archaeology and Art/Archaeological Practice Meets the Phygital

Abstract In this art/archaeological study, we question the utility of the interrelated concepts of provenance, provenience, and paradata as applied to assemblages in art, archaeology, and cultural heritage contexts. We discuss how these overlapping concepts are used to establish values of authenticity and authoritative attributions. However, as cultural assemblages are increasingly being extended through virtualisation, they may exist digitally as well as physically, or as combinations of both, that is phygitally. We show how provenances and paradata can now become unstable and even detached from the assemblage. Through a sequence of collaborative projects, we expose two provenance illusions at the centre of archaeological recording and presentation practices. In these illusions, the archaeologists and much of the archaeology they record actually disappear from the authoritative reports that are published. Using a transdisciplinary, diffractive art/archaeology approach, these illusions are unpacked to reveal how superficially slight changes to traditional archaeological “drawings” and “photographs” have wrought fundamental ontological shifts in their modern phygital incarnations which undermines their provenances and associated paradata. We conclude that archaeology like fine art does not require conscious paradata in order to support statements of authority and interpretation. Instead, we argue that archaeologists should adopt an art/archaeology approach and subvert and dismantle established practices, methods, tools, techniques, and outputs. By highlighting and challenging inconsistencies in what we say we do with what we actually do, we expose gaps in our knowledge and data and shortcomings in our practices. These deficiencies can then be tackled by developing more robust (trans)disciplinary approaches.

Track and Trace, and Other Collaborative Art/Archaeology Bubbles in the Phygital Pandemic

AbstractThis paper describes our creative responses to a surface assemblage (a scatter) of lithic artefacts encountered on either side of a worn track across a field early on in the pandemic. Our art/archaeology response takes place within a phygital nexus in which artefacts or assemblages can be instantiated either physically or digitally, or both. In the nexus we create, connect and explore an ontological multiplicity of – more or less – physical and digital skeuomorphs and other more standard forms of records for sharing (i.e. Latour’s immutable mobiles, such as photographs), but rendered with radically different properties and affordances, at different scales, with different apparatus. These include interactive Reflectance Transformation Images, graphical surface models, machine intelligence style transfer, and 3D prints, all of which were produced in a variety of isolated analytical “bubble” settings and transmitted to and from (both digitally and physically) a home office in an isolated Hampshire village and a home studio in a London suburb. Our approach is to describe, diffractively, the ontological shifts and itineraries associated with some of these objects and assess how this assemblage came to matter as an art/archaeology installation. Ultimately, some of these deterritorialised, (re)colourised, affective, biodegradable, and diffractively born metamorphic instars, now inscribed with new meanings, are returned to the original findspot of the lithics to be (re)discovered.

Zombie Disciplines: Knowledge, Anticipatory Imagination, and Becoming in Postnormal Times

This article does three things: first, it explores the erosions of traditional forms of knowledge and how this is impacting the way change is approached and understood; second, it expands on Ziauddin Sardar’s notion that imagination is central to unlocking new ways of being and knowing the world—and in particular, explores Marcus Bussey’s anticipatory imagination further; and third, we address notions of agency and suggest how, through a reimagining, an ontological shift from Enlightenment notions of Being to new notions of Becoming is available to us, which we believe is worth consideration given our postnormal context.

Differential diagnosis of metabolic disease in a commingled sample from 19th century Hisban, Jordan

ObjectiveThis research attempts a differential diagnosis of skeletal lesions in a commingled sample from Hisban, Jordan, focusing on non-adults in the assemblage. Materials2,883 well-preserved skeletal elements and 9 relatively complete skulls representing an MNI of 32 non-adults (<18 years old). MethodsAll skeletal elements were observed macroscopically and pathophysiological processes underlying any lesions or other anomalies were assessed, followed by a comparative approach to rule out potential diagnoses. ResultsThe skeletal lesions observed were caused by inflammation due to chronic hemorrhaging, marrow hyperplasia due to an increase in hemopoiesis, rapid bone growth, and the impact of biomechanical strain on poorly mineralized elements. Rickets, scurvy, and acquired anemias best fit this pattern of lesions, although inflammation from other sources such as trauma or infection could not be definitively ruled out. ConclusionsThe in utero and postnatal environments at Hisban were conducive to the development of vitamin C and D deficiencies from birth until 2 years of age. The analysis of commingled remains requires an ontological shift in the importance of the individual to the population in paleopathology. SignificanceThis investigation demonstrates the efficacy of a combined biological and comparative approach in differential diagnosis in complicated commingled collections. In addition, it emphasizes the importance of the mother-infant dyad in understanding metabolic disease. LimitationsHistological and radiographic analyses were not included in this diagnostic study due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. Suggestions for further researchIsotopic analysis to investigate childhood diet and histological and radiographic analyses to assess survival of deficiencies.

COVID-19’s Cracks, Climate Crisis, and Academia’s Role in Bringing about an Ontological Shift

"COVID-19’s Cracks, Climate Crisis, and Academia’s Role in Bringing about an Ontological Shift." The Professional Geographer, 74(1), pp. 139–140

Militant Landscape: Notes on Counter-Figuration from Early Modern Genre Formation to Contemporary Practices, or, Landscape after the Failure of Representation

Abstract In 1844, the year of Marx's Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts, J.M.W. Turner presented Rain, Steam, and Speed: The Great Western Railway, the first landscape painting to both articulate the ontological shifts brought about by new modes of extraction and production, but also to suggest concomitant transformation in perception. In this way, it collapsed the dialectical relation between perceiving subject and external landscape, suggesting the reciprocal relationship of reification. In 2013, the contemporary artist and filmmaker Zachary Formwalt produced a piece entitled Projective Geometry in which he read from Chapter 25 of Marx's Capital, the chapter on “So-called Primitive Accumulation.” This voice-over accompanies footage—each shot organized in rigorous single point perspective—of the railroad built by England, France, and Belgium extending from the Ivory Coast to the Cape. Formwalt also unearthed documents from archives in those Imperialist nation states and former/present empires casually mentioning the now unruly, now obedient, yet always “pesky” local African labor that lost life to the enterprise of transportation of local resource extraction to which they were utterly disposable. This essay will describe and analyze both works of art crossing Modernism, aka the culture wing of Modernity (itself a polite term for the ontological shifts brought about by the capitalist mode of production) through the theoretical matrix of Marx, Luxemburg, Sohn-Rethel, and Courtauld.

The future is always-already now: Instituent praxis and the activist university

In this paper, we place the issue of university activism in the context of constituent and constituted power. By this we mean the ever-present danger that activists’ demands will be co-opted and concurrently deactivated. To mitigate this risk, we develop a set of conceptual tools that enables thinking about the activist university in terms of instituent praxis; that is, an open process of co-becoming of an institution and its actors through the continuous co-production of rules that drive their actions. Contrary to the view of the university as something instituted, the activist university that we propose emphasises the possibility of sustaining the process of acting and its underlying rules, rather than the result of the act. The activist university is understood here as a crack that leaves the instituted university open every time the self-production of its subject emerges by the self-transformation of the actors in the very course of their activities. We observe a chance for grounding instituent praxis in the ontological shift in thinking the activist university from being to co-becoming, as this will allow for reclaiming the future for the university and its broader ecology.

Home in the format of «life-work-leisure» in modern pandemic conditions: a sociological dimension

Unexpected changes, risks and constraints that have arisen in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic have led to transformational changes in the social order of many societies. The effects of the pandemic can now be traced in all spheres of modern life. The usual order of everyday life, the criteria of relevance and interpretive schemes for explainig current events, necessary for life and interaction in society are subject to significant changes and form a "new reality". Sociological discourse immediately responded to ontological shifts with empirical research on the effects of the pandemic in teleworking and distance education, gender and domestic violence, health practices, hygiene, leisure, and new forms of sociality.The pandemic situation has brought to the attention of researchers the daily life of man, which has become more localized in the private space of the home. The new social conditions have forced us to reconsider the requirements for living space. Issues of comfortable planning and personal safety, the ability to work and exercise the right to education, development and entertainment have become even more relevant and defining values in the organization of everyday life of modern man.The combination of different functional areas in a single living space has led to the transformation of the perception of home as a private recreation area. This work is devoted to the study of the impact of existing socio-cultural conditions on the processes of changing the attitude of the citizens of Dnipro to the private space of the house in a new format that combines everyday life, work and leisure. An empirical study of in-depth interviews was conducted to capture changes in the perception of home space in today's pandemic environment. The obtained results testified to a significant transformation of ideas about the organization of everyday life and living space of modern man in the current conditions.

‘I feel pretty’: beauty as an affective-material process

This article explores the potential of feminist new materialisms and theories of affect for reframing how we might think about beauty and the body. Through an exploration of girls, beauty and the school ball (prom), the article engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action to conceptualise beauty as an affective-material process. This perspective involves an ontological shift in how girls, bodies and beauty are understood; from thinking about beauty and the human as discursively produced, towards a relational approach that conceptualises materiality and affect as co-constitutive forces. The article is interested in how such a framing might invite ways of understanding beauty that avoid binary frameworks, such as good/bad, subject/object and discourse/matter. I consider the potential this might offer feminist analyses of beauty, where the focus is less on what beauty is or what it means, and more on how it comes to be.

Powered by assemblage: language for multiplicity

Abstract Assemblage is one way to examine complexities in today’s world. In Deleuzian thinking, assemblage refers to both the act of assembling diverse elements and the arrangements of these elements for a specific purpose. Importantly, it is the interaction between elements that allows the assemblage to become more than the sum of its parts. Applying this concept to long-term research on Cold Rush – the transformation of the Arctic commons into commodities – I argue that examining the boom, bust, and buzz around the commons can be fruitfully conceptualised and studied with assemblage. This approach brings with it an ontological shift from binaries into multiplicities and multiple temporalities. Assemblage also sheds light on the role of discourse in these transformations and shows how language gains its productive force only in collaboration with other elements.

Alternative modes of family travel: middle-class parental ‘exit’ strategies as a different orientation towards global citizenship education

ABSTRACT In this paper we focus on two types of middle-class families: those who avoid air travel for environmental reasons and those who choose to live nomadic lives, travelling with their children around the world and staying weeks or months in certain locations, mainly in Asia, South America, and Africa. We analyse data gathered from interviews with parents, blogs, fora and more traditional media, where families presented and explained their choice and offered some detailed accounts on how they perceive their travel practices and its effect on their children. The choice to combine the analysis of these seemly highly contradictory practices together is motivated by the significant similarities found in many of their narratives, both in their non-traditional travel choices that aim to challenge certain middle-class norms, and in their desire to use these unique family travel strategies for global citizenship education. We argue that such an unsettling of normative middle-class practices can be seen as the beginning of an ontological shift in the way GCE is understood and practiced.

Silent cities, silenced histories: subaltern experiences of everyday urban violence during COVID-19

The public health containment measures in response to COVID-19 have precipitated a significant epistemic and ontological shift in �bottom-up� and �action-oriented� approaches in development studies research. �Lockdown� necessitates physical and social distancing between research subject and researcher, raising legitimate concerns around the extent to which �distanced� action-research can be inclusive and address citizens� lack of agency. Top-down regimes to control urban spaces through lockdown in India have not stemmed the experience of violence in public spaces: some have dramatically intensified, while others have changed in unexpected ways. Drawing on our experiences of researching the silent histories of violence and memorialisation of past violence in urban India over the past three decades, we argue that the experience of subaltern groups during the pandemic is not an aberration from their sustained experiences of everyday violence predating the pandemic. Exceptionalising the experiences of violence during the pandemic silences past histories and disenfranchises long struggles for rights in the city. At the same time, we argue that research practices employed to interpret the experience of urban violence during lockdown in India need to engage the changing nature of infrastructural regimes, as they seek to control urban spaces, and as subaltern groups continue to mobilise and advocate, in new ways.

Interculturality, Identity, and Decoloniality

This paper focuses initially on the findings of research undertaken by colleagues-researchers from different countries. Then, the authors explore the postcolonial intercultural challenges from the Abya Yala point of view. The relationship with aboriginal and ancestral peoples is very relevant for understanding power and knowledge in historical processes. The contemporary globalizing world faces new challenges intensified by international connections, by sociocultural movements, and now, by pandemic context. These circumstances of greater interconnectivity and interdependence require each group to reflect and consider their own limits and thresholds in intercultural relationship with others and ecological priorities. The concept of “thought bordering” is discussed outlining its ability to interrogate the modern idea of culture as unique and universal. While greater interconnectivity offers the opportunity for multiple paradigms to emerge, it can also close off chances for mutual recognition and for solidarity if approached without thoughtful engagement. Thought bordering offers us the opportunity to facilitate different ways of being–feeling–thinking–acting, thus promoting an ontological shift that will enable respectful engagements with communities, societies, and ecologies. In this perspective, one is learning from the ancestral peoples about “well-living,” cultivating reciprocity, integrality, complementarity, and relationality in social and ecological relations.

The Problem with Sandra

Abstract The orangutan, Sandra, has been legally granted the status of ‘non-human person.’ Although, a great victory for those who promote animal rights, this has raised questions about the contemporary approaches to personhood. Recent relational ontological shifts, evident in both secular and theological anthropology, risks unfortunate consequences. Like a snake eating its own tail, without proper circumspection, relational ontology is in danger of postulating a problematic circularity of persons creating persons out of nothing. This article explores these recent shifts, the possible pitfalls of relational ontology, and proposes certain theological desiderata.

Decolonizing Methodologies, Situated Resilience, and Country: Insights from Tayal Country, Taiwan

This paper addresses the methodological challenges of working with Indigenous peoples in the Anthropocene. Drawing from the author’s geographical fieldwork with Tayal people, one of sixteen nationally recognized Indigenous groups in Taiwan, it argues that ontological shift is required in the dominant ways of thinking about resilience research. After reviewing a well-adopted Australian custom called ‘Acknowledgement of Country’, the paper addresses the concept of Indigenizing methodology and mobilizing the concepts of ‘Country’ and ‘situated resilience’ in Tayal settings. Finally, the paper proposes methodological principles for better engaging Indigenous knowledge in a more-than-human world on an ethical and constructive basis, as well as its implications for resilience research.