Call for Papers

1st Global Conference

Wednesday 11th July 2012 – Friday 13th  July 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford

“Unlike children in other countries, the Eskimos played no game of war. They played with imaginary rifles and harpoons, but these were never directed against people but against the formidable beasts that haunted the vast wastes of their land.” (Marie Herbert)

The interdisciplinary project Making Sense Of: Play seeks to examine the various meanings of “play”, elucidate their inter-relationships and trace the origins of the patterns of play and their place in the human condition. Variations in cultural conditions naturally impact on play, its meanings and its forms, as do, often in a different way, economic inequalities both within and between different cultures. Our deliberations will necessarily takes this into account. In many languages, as in English, throughout its etymological history “play” has been closely connected to the world of children and make believe. Academic study of play, too, deals predominantly with various aspects of children’s play and its importance in development. There is, in fact, a lack of balance between the study of play in relation to children and childhood on one hand, and “play” more generally, as outlined above, on the other. For this reason our project explicitly emphasizes the comparatively under-explored aspects of play in linguistic, literary, philosophical, historical, psychological and evolutionary frames of reference.

Examples:

What is “play”?  On the one hand, there is the sense of play that has to do with freedom, improvisation, inventiveness, not-in-earnestness, frivolity, fun, though sometimes nastiness, too  (as in playing with someone’s affections or torturing others for pleasure – think Abu Ghraib photographs, for example). On the other hand, there is play which is ritualistic and rule-governed: sport, drama, musical performance, various games, all of which have a strong element of structured performance in common.

We might also consider the play of the senses, both in children and in adults, when we consider the delight we take in looking, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling—a kind of somatic play that reminds us of our connections to the earth and its myriad of sensuous experiences. Artists often consider their task to “play” with sensuous media. Even as they engage in the serious task of making art.

“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.”
(Plato)

Possible Themes:

• in politics
• in literature
• throughout history
• in philosophy
• as a psychological issue
• its evolutionary significance
• in language
• as humour
• in metaphor
• play of perception
• play and the life-course
• relating to existential crisis (illness, death)
• and love
• and hatred
• and power
• animal play

When:

The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 24th February 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday11th May 2012.

How:

Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 key words
E-mails should be entitled: PLAY Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication. We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Who to:

Joint Organising Chairs:
Wendy Turgeon (Project Leader) : turgeon@optonline.net
Rob Fisher (Network Founder and Leader) : play@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the Probing the Boundaries programme of research projects. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting.

If you like this project you may be interested in these ones too: Childhood, Videogame Cultures, Experiential Learning in Virtual Worlds, Storytelling and Creative Engagements.