Transdisciplinary Reflections on Play and Possibility: Uselessness, Value, and Playful Potentiality – Paperback

This edited collection employs a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach to explore how individuals and collectives engage with, facilitate, evaluate, and experience play. It includes chapters from a diverse range of educators, artists and researchers from Finland, Belgium, Jamaica, Iran, the US and the UK, to explore contemporary understandings and applications of play in creative, educational, professional, and performative realms.

The notion of play and its application in a range of contexts (and diverse disciplines) is broadly conceived in this collection and encompasses creative, interpersonal, educational and everyday contexts. The underlying imperative of this edited collection derives from experiences and perspectives gathered during a transdisciplinary research workshop session held at the European Congress on Qualitative Enquiry (Edinburgh Jan 2025) that explored the ‘uselessness’ of play (Akomolafe 2024) and the potential for acting, engaging, educating and imagining ‘otherwise’ (Grosz 2011) through playful acts and pluriversal perspectives (Mignolo 2018).

As a collection, the book troubles practices and expectations of play by drawing from a range of viewpoints and theoretical approaches shaped and informed by feminist new materialist and critical posthuman theoretical frameworks and post-qualitative approaches to researching play from novel and innovative perspectives. Acknowledging the problematic nature of binary definitions, many of the authors explore distinctions between play (imaginative and improvised) and games (rule based and goal oriented) and the slippages or interstitial spaces between them.

The book will be of interest to postgraduate students and academic researchers from the arts, humanities, social sciences, critical race studies, post humanities, critical posthuman feminisms, and education interested in transdisciplinary approaches to researching play and possibility. Researchers from the fields of education, performance, dance, performer training, educational leadership, Possibility studies, post qualitative and feminist post-humanist enquiry and arts-based practice as research are all well-served by the content of this collection.