Paper short abstract:

Playwork is an evolving academic field which is of increasing interest to multi-disciplinary research with a particular focus on urban childhood and youth in a global context. The paper explores discourses and tensions between playwork and sports organisation as intergenerational practices.

Paper long abstract:

The proposal emerges from an ongoing knowledge exchange project which partners with a third sector community development organization advocating for intergenerational community play and playworkers as researchers (Shaw, 2021). The ongoing auto-ethnographic research takes a post-structural approach to spaces in which play occurs, drawing on the notion of heterotopia (Foucault, 1994), social haunting (Gordon, 2008) and feminist paradigms (McNay, 1992).

The concept of play is taken to mean a complex but everyday enactment which can be applied to ideas, language, sport, science, flights of imagination or just messing about. The seduction and challenge of studying play (whoever the players might be) is that 'A game is never the same twice, even if it has the same name and the same players, in the same or a similar physical space' (Shaw 2023:1).

The presentation questions the ontologies and epistemologies which have defined play as an activity of childhood, which nevertheless seeps into adult consciousness through the disciplining discourses of early education and childhood as a social construct. It therefore contests age based socially constructed dichotomies between childhood, youth and adulthood; play, sport, work and leisure. Instead it turns to the possibilities of eco-friendly spaces shared by children, play/youth workers and other adults as 'Everyday Utopias' (Cooper 2014) and invites others to join in an epistemological playground which intertwines literary text and the sociological imagination, and everyday playfulness (Lester, 2020) into post-structural research paradigms.