Playing and affective time-spaces

Abstract

Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro t purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Child's Play?In thinking about children and playing, it was a while before I realized that the two terms seem to coagulate together, and this seemed to happen without much comment. For instance, the first thing you see when picking up a copy of children's geographies (Holloway & Valentine, 2000) is children playing on the cover. Many authors have contributed to the establishment of this link through the very focus of their studies. This includes a number of articles which have been concerned with the provision and use of (often outdoor) play facilities, (see Valentine & McKendrick, 1997; Built Environment, 1999). Other studies, closely aligned with my own research here, have explored the actual practices of playing 2 in after-school clubs (Smith & Barker, 2000), public playgrounds (Gagen, 2000), commercial leisure spaces (McKendrick et al, 2000) and third world rural contexts (Punch, 2000). Indeed, my own research and this paper were based upon and continue to reinforce this subtle connection between playing and childhood.This common move to link playing and childhood contains a number of tacit agreements, which I would like to bring into the foreground. Firstly it presupposes the connection between playing and childhood to be self evident, which is to say, there is something called "child"s play", often thought of as separate from the ludic activity of adults. James et al (1998) suggest that "the culture of childhood might be seen in the linguistic and playgrounds games of children, a collective culture, enduring and separated off from the adult world" (p.99). I believe that the selfevidence of this connection is something that could usefully be investigated and challenged, and part of my focus here will be to gesture towards ways in which this might be done. My working hypothesis will be that certain statements about playing should be applicable to all people, rather than just limited to young people. It is therefore crucial to my mind that any theorization of playing, such as the one I hope to elaborate in this paper, must account for an activity which is done by people of all ages. Such an argument seeks to obliquely engage with recent work in children"s geography, which has been debating the differences and connections between adults and children (Philo, 2003;Jones, 2003), and the blurred boundary between adulthood and childhood (Valentine, 2003). 3The second tacit agreement that underpins the studies mentioned earlier, is that play is talked about only in so far as it...

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