Publication Type
Book Review
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
1-2019
Abstract
Experimental Practice is one of the latest incarnations of Duke University Press’s 36-part ‘Experimental Futures’ book series; a series that intends to question, to provoke, and to provide an innovative theoretical starting point for a radical reimagination of the contemporary world and its unfolding futures. From the outset, then, Experimental Practice is positioned as a challenge to preconceived ideas of social, political and economic structures and justices. Materiality and matter provide the theoretical groundings from which this challenge is launched. Through them, Papadopoulos articulates a new understanding of the interdependencies of the human and nonhuman worlds. Through them, he also develops an understanding of ‘alternative ontologies’; or, as he puts it, ‘alterontologies’, of everyday life. These alterontologies guide his critical exploration of normative techniques of knowledge production, and of everyday socio-political practices. Perhaps as a stylistic rejection of such normativity, Experimental Practice is a self-professed work of ‘social science fiction’ that switches between the poetic and the scholarly in a coherent and evocative way. An example of this can be found in the closing two sentences of the Introduction (p. 10), which state:Something else, something existential is at stake here: alterontological politics is a possible way to survive a world that is disintegrating through human action. Alterontologies may be a way to escape humanity.
Discipline
Arts and Humanities
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Social and Cultural Geography
First Page
1
Last Page
2
ISSN
1464-9365
ISBN
9781478000846
Identifier
10.1080/14649365.2019.156783
Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge): STM, Behavioural Science and Public Health Titles
Citation
WOODS, Orlando.(2019). Book review of 'Experimental practice: Technoscience, alterontologies, and more-than-social movements' by Dimitris Papadopoulos. Social and Cultural Geography, , 1-2.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2787
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.156783