Where’s the ontology?

Responding to the line above, Brian Rappert made a serious attempt to sum up the day in a handful of questions:

Mike Lynch: Yes, that’s the question, where is it?

Moortje Marres: Not sure if ‘it’ is with me.

Ted Schatzki: You are kinda standing in it and it’s over there with those folk, but let’s not worry about it too much.

Arie Rip: It’s coming soon.

Other than that, it seemed extremely difficult to identify common threads in the various perspectives on what ontologies are, what they do and how they should be theorised.

A turn to ontology in STS?

We observe a discernible increase in recent years of the use of the term “ontology” in STS literatures. What if anything does this signal? Can this be construed as a turn to ontology and what does this mean? 

Does an increasing use of the term ontology simply reflect a change in vocabulary? Is it different from “radical constructivist” perspectives? For example, did Woolgar’s (1991) injunction to find out how “the reality of the technology [is] itself created, described and sustained” foreshadow Mol’s (2002) focus on how “ontologies are brought into being, sustained or allowed to wither away” without actually mentioning the term? Is saying that processes and practices enact phenomena the same as saying they are constitutively social? Are STSers by and large still pursuing the same agenda or does the emergence of “ontology” reflect a significant change of emphasis? 

What are the various ways in which “ontology” is being used by STSers and others? Is the use of the term now a normative feature of our disciplinary practice ie do we risk exclusion if we do not pepper our analyses with terms such as “ontology” “the material” and so on?