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Politicizing ontology

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Progress in Human Geography

Published online on

Abstract

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.