Cultural Pervasiveness or Objective Violence?: Three Questions about KOS as Cultural Arbiters

Knowledge organization and knowledge organization systems are pervasive in human experience, yet the effect of this pervasiveness is overlooked and little analyzed. Several authors have called for a theory of knowledge organization that embraces cultural and social realities alongside domain-centric ontologies. Examples of leading studies point to pervasive and occasionally oppressive discourses embracing race, sex and gender and economics. Three research questions are presented about how to study knowledge organization systems as cultural arbiters and how to incorporate temporality and atemporality into the methodology of subject ontogeny.