Back to Basics: the Importance of Ontological Lens Shaping Research
From climate change, to influx of migrants and refugees, to resource scarcity, and now, a pandemic—cities are in the heart of action. It is here that social and political groups and governments are interacting and responding to emergent and present concerns. These interactions are producing political geographies by shaping new or revisiting pre-existing concerns about inequality and claims to the city. They also bear implications for political stability of societies.
Conducting rigorous research to make sense of how these trends interact with local politics and everyday governance in cities is important. But what constitutes “rigorous research”? Depending on whom one asks, the answer could range from conducting ethnographic research in the field to large-n studies that control for confounding factors to identify parsimonious analysis.
Often times, this question tends to get bogged down by heated debates on the soundness and (or) superiority of method. The question, however, as some argue, should focus on a researcher’s ontological lens (understanding of the world) that shapes a research question and thus, efforts to address it (Stinchcombe 1968; Searle 1995; Jackson 2011). This is simply because the nature of the world is far from decided. Favoring one worldview over the other is within the province of scholars but it does not establish definitively the exact contours of the world we live in.
Perspective—Looking through the Lens (Photo by Zachary Keimig on Unsplash)
Differing ontological preferences shape varying explanations. For some, reality is so complex and subjective that one can only reconstruct experiences to the best of one’s ability. Research in such an understanding is about meaning-making. Generalizable accounts, on the other hand, are shaped by a starkly different ontological lens. In such a view, reality exists independent of a researcher’s understanding and can best be understood through empirical and observable data. Repeated falsification of hypotheses may lead to generalizable accounts that may hold over space and time. If motivated by the former, a scholar studying water crises in a city in a developing country may spend months in the field, collecting data pertaining to water access and availability through multiple accounts to make sense of “reality”. If shaped by the latter, a scholar may identify variables related to water scarcity, economic, and political well-being (variables dependent on the hypothesis) in ideally, more than one case to suggest generalizable trends.
Similarly, two authors explain insecurity in cities in vastly different ways. In describing precarious living conditions of residents in Cochabamba, one of the poorest cities in Bolivia and the world, Goldstein (2012: 4-6) writes,
“To be insecure is to occupy a habitus of fear and uncertainty that is at once social, psychological and material. Living in one of the poorest cities…the residents of the Cochabamba’s marginal barrios feel insecure: insecurity colors their entire worldview, the way they relate to their neighbors, residents of nearby communities, and strangers in their midst; it shapes their relationships with entities as distant as state and municipal authorities, and as close as their spouses and children.
To be insecure is to lack the power to make effective change in your own life, to protect those small investments you have made in your home and livelihood, and to defend your family from crime. Insecurity physically shapes your home; it structures your movements through space and conditions your relationship to personal property. Insecurity means there is no reliable police force in your neighborhood to whom you can turn in times of crisis—it means instead that you call 911 over and over again, and if anyone answers they offer promises but no actual help.….
Insecurity is fundamentally about disorder: it is a sense that the world is unpredictable, out of control, and inherently dangerous, and that within this chaos the individual must struggle desperately just to survive…..In the space of insecurity, people have to continually reinvent themselves and their behaviors, calling on what they know or think they know about the world in order to act purposively and meaningfully in it. In this way, they hope to establish the very sense of order and pattern that their worlds otherwise lack, a sense of control over their environments, their livelihoods, and their lives….
Despite this disorder, however, the insecure space of the marginal barrio is not devoid of law; it is not truly outside the reach of the state, though it may feel that way to those who live there. Indeed...the law operates with power in the marginal barrio, as the state attempts to make legible and minimally control the outlawed settlements on its urban fringes.”
Kilcullen (2013: 232-237), on the other hand, writes about insecurity in crowded, poorly governed coastal cities,
“…one face of the new complex of urban problems is playing out in Syria today…rebels are fighting from house to house and block to block in several cities …at the same time…we can see another face of the new normal, in the world’s fastest-growing megacity—Dhaka …. Like Daraa and Benghazi, where the Syrian and Libyan civil wars began, Dhaka is an urban ecosystem under extreme stress, operating right at the edge of its capacity…across the world the sun is rising through the smoke haze over La Rocinha, in the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro…Patrols roam the narrow streets on foot and by motorcycle….in an operational pattern that looks a lot like a police-led urban counterinsurgency, Baghdad style….
On the other side of the Atlantic from Rio, it’s midday on Africa’s west coast….Built on a swamp, Lagos is fighting for survival. Ceaseless migration is strangling it… As well as occurring simultaneously in different cities, these problems—from poverty and social unrest to gang warfare, organized crime, insurgency, terrorism, and even out-and-out civil war—can coexist in one city at the same time. Feral cities are emerging in some countries, and feral districts have arisen in many cities.…. The periurban world is also, as we’ve seen, highly connected….and problems in one place can rapidly escalate and spread to others.”
Understanding the ontological preferences that shape these interpretations is key to not only finding common ground but also developing a sense of places described by both scholars from varying vantage points.
Especially so as multiple challenges converge in cities. Favoring one or the other approach is the prerogative of experts but stating such preferences upfront keeps the door to collaborative research open. It also prevents from entering in cul-de-sacs of intellectual arguments that drown out voices of dissent. It goes without saying that these understandings have consequences not only for theoretical debates, but for policy interventions affecting the lives of ordinary people. Concern with ontologies, then, is more than an academic exercise.
