Ludic Inquiries Into Power and Pedagogy in Higher Education
How Games Play Us
Amelia Walker editor Alison L Black editor Helen Grimmett editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published:30th Aug '24
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This book interrogates the role games and playfulness bear in both formal education and informal social learning. Responsive to contemporary social and ecological challenges, this book especially explores games’ interactions with social power. On one hand, games sometimes operate to reinforce ideologies that normalise social injustice and environmental disregard. On the other, games offer rich possibilities for questioning such ideologies and encouraging change.
Strongly interdisciplinary, the book assembles 20 chapters written by 50 experts across fields including education, game design, cultural studies, sociology, Indigenous studies, disability studies, queer studies, STEM, legal studies, history, creative writing, visual arts, music, the creative industries, and social inclusion. These contributions not only make games a focus but incorporate playful research writing strategies, demonstrating methods of what we term ludic inquiry. This includes chapters written using arts-based research, practice-led research, poetic inquiry, narrative inquiry, autoethnography, duoethnography, and more.
Organised across four themes – ‘philosophical sparks’, ‘lived experiences’, ‘pedagogical perspectives’, and ‘the spirit of play’ – this book emphasises the radical egalitarian possibilities inherent in critical attention to games and how we play (or get played by) them. Its fresh insights will interest all readers interested in creatively remaking our worlds.
A highly useful resource for practitioners, emerging to established, operating across expansive modes of creative practice. Incorporating multiple perspectives, this text offers various methods – transferable and adaptable across a variety of disciplines – future-minded, action-based approaches to complex issues. A deft collection, offering playful opportunities for empathic and intersectional engagement.
Associate Professor Julia Prendergast
Discipline Leader: Creative Writing, Literature, and Publishing (Swinburne University)
President|Chair of the Executive Committee: Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP)
This important book is essential reading for all educators interested the aspects of ‘play’ in its broadest sense, in the pedagogical arena. It is a timely reminder of the function and need for play to engage and invigorate students and teachers in all fields.
Dr. Grant Caldwell, a senior lecturer in the Creative Writing Program at The University of Melbourne, where he has coordinated the large first-year Creative Writing subject for over ten years. Dr. Caldwell is also a widely published poet and novelist.
This timely and multi-faceted book places games, game-playing, ludic inquiry, rule-making, rule-bending and rule-breaking firmly in the world of academic research into power, privilege, creativity, cross-cultural and colonial critiques, pedagogical methods, and the system itself of beliefs and practices that builds for us our universities and what we have come to call academia. And it is an important development. We need only reflect briefly on the deeply ambivalent values and ambiguous meanings we can draw from terms that are embedded in language to sense the importance of such an inquiry: ‘play the game’, ‘the long game’, ‘game-playing’, ‘gaming’, ‘the spirit of the game’, and many others to be found in this book. Most importantly, the book itself is an invitation to set out on the much ignored and even feared pathways of discovery-through-play.
Emeritus Professor Kevin Brophy AM
Creative Writing, University of Melbourne
ISBN: 9781032583464
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 640g
294 pages