Challenging Contemporary Thinking on Play

This book explores the leaps and overlaps of play and aesthetic activity, across theories of feminism and posthumanism, neuroscience, ethology, pedagogy and postdevelopmental thinking, sociologies of space, game design and digital play from the very young to artist’s practice.

This book explores the leaps and overlaps of play and aesthetic activity, across theories of feminism and posthumanism, neuroscience, ethology, pedagogy and postdevelopmental thinking, sociologies of space, game design and digital play from the very young to artist’s practice. It concludes with an entirely original exploration of dark play, and its complexities. As a series of interview or conversation pieces, key thinkers in each area of focus toy with positions around their field’s identification of play, proactively countering their Eurocentric demographic by drawing on examples of playful and arts practice/’research acts’ from as diverse a global reach as possible. Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodology including phenomenological, materialist, posthumanist and arts practice as a form of research, the book challenges and criticizes over-used or lazy applications of play and bring theories of possibility and thinking into the arena of culture within contemporary conceptual reference. Formulaic and production-led education is critiqued, arguing that to engage more fully with pedagogies of play and its in-built interdisciplinarity and criticality carries risks but with that, transformative practices.