Experimental Practice: Technoscience, Alterontologies, and More-Than-Social Movements(Experimental Futures)

In Experimental Practice Dimitris Papadopoulos explores the potential for building new forms of political and social movements through the reconfiguration of the material conditions of existence. Rather than targeting existing institutions in demands for social justice, Papadopoulos calls for the creation of alternative ontologies of everyday life that would transform the meanings of politics and justice. Inextricably linked to technoscience, these “alterontologies”-which Papadopoulos examines in a variety of contexts, from AIDS activism and the financialization of life to hacker communities and neuroscience-form the basis of ways of life that would embrace the more-than-social interdependence of the human and nonhuman worlds. Speaking to a matrix of concerns about politics and justice, social movements, matter and ontology, everyday practice, technoscience, the production of knowledge, and the human and nonhuman, Papadopoulos suggests that the development of alterontologies would create more efficacious political and social organizing.

Table of Contents:
Introduction  1 1. Decolonial Politics of Matter  11 Part I. Movements 2. Biofinancialization as Terraformation  27 3. Ontological Organizing  49 Part II. History Remix 4. Activist Materialism  79 5. Insurgent Posthumanism  94 Part III. Alterontologies 6. Brain Matter  117 7. Compositional Technoscience  138 8. Crafting Ontologies  160 Acknowledgments  209 Notes  211 References  257 Index  323

About the Author :
Dimitris Papadopoulos is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at the University of Nottingham and coauthor of Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the Twenty-First Century and Analysing Everyday Experience: Social Research and Political Change.

Review :
"Offering a mix of keen insights . . . Experimental Practice is a book that will be valuable to academics who share the author's questions and frame of reference." - DJ Mattingly (Choice) "Excellent. . . . Experimental Futures pulls together in endlessly inspiring fashion many concepts and ideas that have been to the forefront of engaged scholarship in geography." - Patrick Bresnihan (Antipode) "Experimental Practice is a thorough and practical account of how matter matters, and how we can bring the non-human or more-than-human world into our political calculus and convincingly sets out a case for experimental practices." - Nicholas Beuret (Sociological Review) "The range of case studies that is presented – from AIDS activism, to HSBC advertising campaigns, to the Struggle for Calais – helps to ground Papadopoulos’s theoretical arguments, and to moderate some of the creative licence that comes from his writing of ‘social science fiction.' . . . Consistently and provocatively argues for a reimagination of socio-political organisation and justice in/and the world." - Orlando Woods (Social & Cultural Geography) "Experimental Practice takes a step forward in challenging the 'social' in Social Movement Studies by exploring the long ignored post-human entanglements of social movements. This original lens provides an important insight for scholars concerned with emancipatory struggles by foregrounding the interdependence of social-movements with their environment, and thus reconceptualizing political autonomy as the ability to remain open and to engage in transformative connections with a multiplicity of human and non-human actors." - Álvaro Ramírez March (Social Movement Studies)