Field, H and Giddings, S and Highmore, B (Eds).
(2025)
Playthings and Playtimes: Play, affect and material culture in the ludic world.
[Book].
UCL Press: London, UK.
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Abstract
In 2024 at the Barbican Art Gallery in London, the Mexico-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs exhibited films of children from across the world playing with sticks, hoops, marbles and other toys. The implication was clear: play feels and looks like a universal language but takes on specific local forms. Using this as a starting point, Playthings and Playtimes explores the conflict and contradictions that circulate when play is simultaneously recognized as a species attribute (part of human nature) and as something crucially differentiated across time and space by design, technology, sentiment, pedagogic values and so on. The chapters in this volume demonstrate this interplay between the fixed and the mutable. Topics range from the elaborate miniature worlds made by H. G. Wells and his sons to digitized fidget spinners, from avant-garde Uruguayan artist Joaquín Torres-García’s wooden blocks to the playground spaces of Kuwait, and from the much-maligned plastic toy to the new museum Young V&A. Together, they bring play and the world of feelings into sustained contact with the history of material culture and design, psychoanalysis, childhood studies and other disciplines concerned with play culture. In the process, Playthings and Playtimes investigates key elements of a humanities approach to the modern world through the prism of play’s affective materiality.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | Playthings and Playtimes: Play, affect and material culture in the ludic world |
| ISBN-13: | 9781800089624 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781800089624 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089624 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Collection © Editors, 2025 Text © Contributors, 2025 Any third-party material in this book is not covered by the book's Creative Commons licence. Details of the copyright ownership and permitted use of third-party material is given in the image (or extract) credit lines. Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book's Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright owner. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. This licence allows you to share and adapt the work for non-commercial use providing attribution is made to the author and publisher (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work) and any changes are indicated. Attribution should include the following information: Field, H., Giddings, S. and Highmore, B. (eds). 2025. Playthings and Playtimes: Play, affect and material culture in the ludic world. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800089624 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ |
| Keywords: | play, affect theory, childhood studies, toys, digital play, material culture studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10214365 |
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