THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF ULLAPOOLISM making mischief from within contemporary book cultures

Abstract

This article proposes Ullapoolism, a post-data, activist, autoethnographic epistemology for contemporary book culture studies. It begins by addressing the challenges of contemporaneity and multidisciplinarity in researching the creation, circulation and use of books. We identify a rigidity that limits existing theoretical frameworks for the study of book cultures, and a paucity in existing research modes – including those from literary sociology, the digital humanities and cultural analytics – that collect, count and model book cultures. Our alternative epistemology, Ullapoolism, draws on two modes of action developed by the Situationist International – détournements, mischievous re-inscript..