Children’s production of place and (third) space during Covid 19: Den building, filmmaking and the postdigital in the Play Observatory

Abstract

The Play Observatory was a COVID-19 rapid response project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) exploring children’s play experiences during the pandemic through an online survey, case studies and a filmmaking workshop. With access to many of the usual spaces and places of play curtailed during the lockdowns of the pandemic, in this article, we focus on children’s resourceful and playful placemaking during the restrictions, as well as their creation of mediated third spaces in their own homes and neighbourhoods. We discuss Play Observatory survey submissions centring on children’s use of space and place in their play. Images of den-building showed imaginative productions of worlds in the spaces of the home in which children felt secure. Arguably this was to do with the way they used material artefacts to move the locus of control closer to themselves, even as the world seemed out of control for many. In the same way, video clips and films submitted to the Observatory revealed much about everyday life during the pandemic, the third spaces that were enabled and the postdigital worlds of entanglement in which children played. This paper will present and discuss contributions to the Play Observatory’s archive which are revelatory of children’s exploration of time, space and placemaking during restrictions associated with the pandemics. In our explanation of how the pandemic influenced play, we offer insights into young people’s postdigital and collusive creative practices and their playful imbrication of material and cultural resources.

Theory-building in the social, material and postdigital worlds of play: Participatory research and multimodal discourse analysis

“…This means drawing further on the recent work of Rowsell who connects these issues to ‘making’ in the context of living literacies where there is time and space for children and young people to consider the ‘what if’ of everyday practices (Rowsell et al, 2020: 157). In the work in both projects, described below, we will see examples where, in the context of children’s games, as performed in living literacies, there is scope for this to take place and, in the context of the pandemic, where it further becomes a necessity in children’s play (Potter et al, 2024).…”

“…Moving further in this direction we would need to consider theories of media effect, production and representation (Buckingham, 2003; Hall et al, 2013) but for these projects, it has also been important to consider how children are part of a network of relations between bodies, texts, practices and artefacts (Burnett and Merchant, 2020). We have arguably demonstrated children’s imbrication with media resources and technological artefacts, in their postdigital relations to knowledge and experience (Jandric et al, 2018), in this case, their commonly held knowledge of play and we have begun to see how these episodes of play in the pandemic provide us with new methodological and theoretical directions, combinations of affect and embodiment which we are now exploring further (Olusoga, 2024; Potter et al, 2024). These place analyses of episodes in alignment with both posthumanist and postdigital thinking, building on the calls of Pahl and Rowsell (2006) and Burn (2009) for mergers of both structural and sociocultural theories.…”

“…This was supported by 10 in-depth interviews over Zoom with different families and a video workshop which produced a further four examples of children's video productions based on their experiences. We have analysed many of these and work is ongoing (Bishop, 2023;Cannon et al, 2023;Cowan et al, 2021;Olusoga, 2024;Olusoga et al, 2022Olusoga et al, , 2024Potter and Cannon, 2023;Potter et al, 2024). Bearing in mind the earlier definition of 'example' as a key piece of data redolent with 'theory-building' potential (Bezemer et al, 2019) I want to link a key piece of data with the findings from 'Playing the Archive'.…”