About

This blog acts as a platform for discussing further the questions and issues raised in the one-day workshop, A Turn to Ontology, held at the Said Business School on 25 June, 2008.

The papers, responses and programme are available here.

Below is the announcement sent out to participants prior to the meeting:

Recent developments in Science and Technology Studies (STS) have spawned important new concepts and directions. The post essentialist agenda has been supplemented by ideas about ambivalence (eg Singleton, Law) – which stresses the contention that the impact, use and interpretation of entities is never certain nor fixed; multiplicity (eg Mol, de Laet and Mol, Quattrone and Hopper, Thompson) – that objects and claims simultaneously exist in many different guises; and deferral (eg Rappert, Lee and Brown) – that the impact, use and interpretation of entities is delayed and/or dispersed through organisational networks, often with the effect of dissipating accountability. These moves underpin what can be called the turn to relational ontology ie the argument that the essence and existence of entities are best understood as the temporary upshot of interconnecting relations. While this argument applies to “technical things and objects”, it also more generally implicates the ontological status of a whole range of “nature” and “natural things”.