Ontological locationality: A reflection on positionality

Palat Narayanan's concept of ontological locationality – the position from which research concerns emerge, distinct from geography or researcher identity – is examined through a researcher's career trajectory. Institutional contexts, metropolitan knowledge hegemony and funding structures are considered in terms of their entanglement with ontological locationality. While affirming Palat Narayanan's rejection of reductive identitarian modes of framing knowledge, feminist scholarship on positionality and situated knowledge is found to be somewhat sidelined. Two key questions are posed: how ontological locationality would benefit from engagement with feminist scholarship on structures of knowledge, and how to disentangle the locationality of critiques of metropolitan knowledge from its embedding in metropolitan institutions.