Ontology

A branch of philosophy that is the science of what is. It seeks the classification and explanation of entities.

In 'Decolonizing Design Through the Perspectives of Cosmological Others: Arguing for an ontological turn in design research and practice', Ansari argues that many ontologies or concepts we take for granted as fundamental are not. For example, nature, culture, race, gender class, are all constructed.

They asset that ontologies are 'cosmologically specific' - using the phrase cosmology instead of culture to denote that we are talking about large constellations of ontologies that structure the way in which human communities make sense of the cosmos they are in.

Strathen, in her text Relation, argues that whenever we construct knowledge around an unfamiliar 'Other' we make what is local and familiar to them feel familiar to us through a process of reduction by passing what is observed through our own concepts of hte world, in what amounts to a 'globalisation' of knowledge.