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The paper explicates a politicized conception of reality with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I contend that Foucault’s genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. His idea o...
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The paper explicates a politicized conception of reality with the help of Michel Foucault’s critical project. I contend that Foucault’s genealogies of power problematize the relationship between ontology and politics. His idea of productive power incorporates a radical, ontological claim about the nature of reality: Reality as we know it is the result of social practices and struggles over truth and objectivity. Rather than translating the true ontology into the right politics, he reverses the argument. The radicality of his method lies in showing how the ontological order of things is in itself the outcome of a political struggle: Ontology is politics that has forgotten itself. I argue that Foucault’s thought accomplishes the politicization of ontology with two key theoretical moves. The first is the contestation and provocation of all given and necessary ontological foundations. He affirms the ontological view that there is a discontinuity between reality and all ontological schemas that order it, and a subsequent indeterminacy of reason in establishing ultimate truths or foundations. After this initial step whereby ontology is denaturalized—made arbitrary or at least historically contingent—the way is open for explanations that treat the alternative and competing ontological frameworks as resulting from historical, linguistic and social practices of power. The second key move is thus the exposure of power relations and their constitutive role in our conception of reality. I conclude by considering the implications of Foucault’s politicization of ontology for our understanding of politics.
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In this article, I examine the Rajapur Irrigation Project (RIP), a large-scale infrastructure project to "modernize" a farmer-managed irrigation system in Nepal, as a political encounter between two ontologies or what Blaser calle...
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In this article, I examine the Rajapur Irrigation Project (RIP), a large-scale infrastructure project to "modernize" a farmer-managed irrigation system in Nepal, as a political encounter between two ontologies or what Blaser called "ways of worlding": Tharu farmers' fluid practices of living with the Karnali River and engineers' methods of structurally training waterways. In tracing how the logic and world-making practices of the RIP overwrote the place-based ontologies of local farmers through the concrete structures it enacted and left behind, I introduce ontological marginalization as a political process that can occur when one situated understanding of what the world is and how it should be (re)made is imposed on another through structural interventions. I demonstrate infrastructure's power to enforce certain ontologies while marginalizing others, and I also explore how people reassert agency and world-making practices through acts of ontological reclamation in the aftermath of interventions. Ultimately, this article contributes to emergent discussions on infrastructure and its ontological impacts within geography by developing the dual concepts of ontological marginalization and reclamation as ways for scholars to better account for the political implications of infrastructure on diverse ways of worlding.
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The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is us...
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The first challenge faced by a project that seeks to bring concerns with ontology and indigeneity into a conversation is to sort out the various (and possibly divergent) projects that are being mobilized when the former term is used, not the least because what do we mean by ontology impinges upon how we can conceive indigeneity. In this article I play a counterpoint between two 'ontological' projects: one in geography, that foregrounds a reality conceived as an always-emergent assemblage of human and non-humans and troubles the politics that such assemblages imply. The other in ethnographic theory, that foregrounds that we are not only dealing with a shifting ontology, a (re)animated world, but also with multiple ontologies, a multiplicity of worlds animated in different ways. Thus, if the heterogeneity of always emerging assemblages troubles the political, the very heterogeneity of these heterogeneous assemblages troubles it even more. What kinds of politics and what kinds of knowledges does this troubling demand? I advance the notion of political ontology as a possible venue to explore this question.
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This paper is a response to a growing body of geographical literature exploring the interface between ontology and politics. We develop an understanding that does not start by building ontological bedrocks, to which the question o...
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This paper is a response to a growing body of geographical literature exploring the interface between ontology and politics. We develop an understanding that does not start by building ontological bedrocks, to which the question of politics is then rooted. Ontology building, we argue, operates against the essential possibility of the political invested in ontological openness, and thus remains blind to politics inconsistent with, but also practised upon, its own foundations. We propose a relation between the political and the ontological as questioning that grows from the events and situations, which ontologically position us in multiple and unexpected ways.
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We study efforts at promoting deliberative mini-publics as a model of democracy. Our focus is on practices supporting the circulation of know-how for doing mini-publics. In this paper we center on the building of infrastructures f...
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We study efforts at promoting deliberative mini-publics as a model of democracy. Our focus is on practices supporting the circulation of know-how for doing mini-publics. In this paper we center on the building of infrastructures for knowledge exchange in and around a network known as Democracy R&D. This is a network of mini-publics practitioners from around the world with the declared goal of adding momentum to democratic innovation by enhancing translocal connections, community building, and knowledge. We look at how the network is organized, how online communication platforms are installed, and how observatory devices draw dispersed practices together into a shared frame of mutual learning and collective action. How do such practices configure the ways in which knowledge can flow across sites? How do they constitute an instrument space , a translocal assemblage of knowing and doing democracy by means of deliberative mini-publics? Using concepts like scopic media and centers of calculation , we discuss these practices for how they enable and constrain the circulation of know-how, configure processes of mutual learning, shape the translocal innovation process, and thus, at a distance, also prefigure local ways of knowing and doing politics.
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This paper offers a further exploration of 'flat ontology', an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, an...
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This paper offers a further exploration of 'flat ontology', an account of the world that takes the immanence of localized, material process to be fundamentally different from and ontologically prior to transcendent, structured, and formal treatments of space. Our previous work in this area aimed at developing the concept of the site - via site ontology- as an 'event-space' that describes the differential contours and pressures of aggregating and dispersing bodies. This paper's contribution lies in considering how politics and political potentials are specified by such event-spaces. In geography and other fields, politics has nearly always been thought to proceed from and to exist for subjects, regardless of how they get theorized. Here we explore how the site might initiate politics that neither presuppose nor undergird individual subject positionalities or mass identitarian categories. We argue that subjectivity - widely understood to be the motive force in organizing politics - is often 'suspended' where bodies encounter or get enlisted in the unanticipated connections and relations that site ontology describes. Thus, our account understands the site as autonomous with respect to the subject in two crucial ways. The site is: (1) organizationally autonomous: its rules emerge from its specific, localized relations and this material immanence makes the site the legislator of its own assembly; and (2) politically autonomous: that is, not conditioned by the political schemata of subjectivity per se, even though sites diversely and differently enlist and reshuffle bodies that often attend to, direct, participate in, and inhabit subjective politics.
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This article grows from a discontent with the equation of topology to relational thinking in the recent geographical literature operating under the rubric of post-mathematical topology. In order to find a more subtle way for compr...
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This article grows from a discontent with the equation of topology to relational thinking in the recent geographical literature operating under the rubric of post-mathematical topology. In order to find a more subtle way for comprehending topology, the article shows that there exists an entirely different tradition of topological thought, which is explicitly connected to the problematic around the notion of ontology. An alternative approach is suggested, where not only the relational constitution of topology is properly taken into account, but where an in-depth reading of the ontological aspect is offered. Instead of fabricating another ontology of topology, the article argues that it is the ontology itself, which takes place topologically, that is, it is place-bound. By relying on Heidegger's insight about the bond between place (topos) and being (ontology), the article proposes an approach that is concentrated on the manifold modes through which topological relations are ontologically revealed, ordered, and defined. It acknowledges three topological tensions - thing-gathering, gathering-revealing, and concealing-revealing - in order to highlight the structure of the place in which the question of ontology, and ontological politics are entwined.
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We ask what it would mean to take seriously the possibility of multiple water ontologies, and what the implications of this would be for water governance in theory and practice. We contribute to a growing body of literature that i...
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We ask what it would mean to take seriously the possibility of multiple water ontologies, and what the implications of this would be for water governance in theory and practice. We contribute to a growing body of literature that is reformulating understanding of human-water relations and refocusing on the fundamental question of what water ‘is’. Interrogating the political-ontological ‘problem space’ of water governance, we explore a series of ontological disjunctures that persist. Rather than seeking to characterize any individual ontology, we focus on the limitations of silencing diverse ontologies, and on the potential of embracing ontological plurality in water governance. Exploring these ideas in relation to examples from the Canadian province of British Columbia, we develop the notion of ontological conjunctures, which is based on networked dialogue among multiple water ontologies and which points to forms of water governance that begin to embrace such a dialogue. We highlight water as siwlkw and the processual concept of En’owkin as examples of this approach, emphasizing the significance of cross-pollinating scholarship across debates on water and multiple ontologies.
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This paper scrutinises the possibilities Martin Heidegger's notion of 'the event of revealing' (Ereignis) poses for spatial theory. It shows how Heidegger's work on 'the event' and its 'fourfold' constitution (between earth, sky, ...
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This paper scrutinises the possibilities Martin Heidegger's notion of 'the event of revealing' (Ereignis) poses for spatial theory. It shows how Heidegger's work on 'the event' and its 'fourfold' constitution (between earth, sky, mortals and divinities) affords a spatial understanding of ontology as a site revealed around the assemblage of things. Accordingly, spatial ontologies do not grow from the multiplicity of human constructions and social relations, but from the radical ontological finitude constitutive for the revealing of the material site of the thing. Through such post-human understanding of the event, it becomes possible to think spatiality, not just in accordance with the influence Heidegger's thought could have on the material understanding of spatiality, but in accordance with the rich understanding we could gain by exploring the politics of finite ontologies, the politics intrinsic for the different happenings of revealing.
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In view of persisting and multiple crises', coming to grips with sociospatial change is one of the key tasks in geographical political economy today. However, to date, philosophical misunderstandings and the related lack of produc...
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In view of persisting and multiple crises', coming to grips with sociospatial change is one of the key tasks in geographical political economy today. However, to date, philosophical misunderstandings and the related lack of productive scholarly exchange has prevented this task from being satisfyingly addressed. In this paper I discuss the Cultural Political Economy approach and discourse theory in order to expose some key misunderstandings and to argue in favour of more philosophical awareness. By setting up a dialogue between the two approaches I aim to demonstrate the benefits of a constructive engagement between perspectives rooted in ontologically different positions.
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