Full Description
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.
Contents
PART I. Philosophical sparks and promises of transformation. 1. Weaving conceptual, philosophical, and methodological threads amongst tapestries of privilege, power, and pedagogy. 2. Diversity and cultural pedagogical games and play: Through an Aboriginal lens. 3. Women leadership in higher education: Using positional power to change the game and amplify women's voices. 4. Power and the game of higher education: Self-validating aggrandisement or transformational praxis?. 5. oWL, Bear, ::machine:: : Virtual NPC design as a shamanistic mode of resistance. PART II. Lived experiences. 6. Mahjong, the PhD and me: Which game should I play and how?. 7. Navigating the academic panopticon: An autoethnographic exploration of chronic illness, productivity, and belonging in academia. 8. Queer(y)ing board games as public pedagogy: 'Playing out of bounds' to activate LGBTQIA+ agency in academia and beyond. 9. Here to kick neoliberalism in the balls: The bogan in the university. 10. Games and invasion: Accounts of lived experience from First Nations writers, artists, and researchers. PART III. Pedagogical perspectives. 11. Academic kinship: I once had a game, or should I say it once had me?. 12. As play becomes practice: Observations on robust gamified education elements in the new normal. 13. Ludic reflections: Exploring strains of relational thought arising in a video games-based 'STEMinar' course. 14. Playing the game of education is playing the game of life for students with disability. Part IV. The spirit of play. 15. Playing with power and being played: Collaborative gameplay as a site of connection and insight. 16. Ludic lessons in liminality: A provocation from playing Solitaire. 17. Cards against academia: Playing the game of 'opportunities' through a feminist friendship lens. 18. Refluxus - Four soluble heads: Collective play through domestic art pedagogy. 19. Gaming the system: Choosing to play the infinite game in academia. 20. Remembering how to play: Breaking the rules (with meaning)
