‘Children’, observed Colin Ward in his influential 1978 study, The child in the city, ‘will play anywhere and with anything’ (1978, p. 86). An apparently universal impulse, play has even been argued by some scholars to transcend history as an activity ‘older than culture’ (Huizinga, 1949, p. 1). The historian’s natural inclination is to historicise such contentions, alert to factors of geography as well as chronology and to intersections including age, gender and social class. Building on burgeoning scholarship concerning the construction and experience of children’s play worlds, this special edition of the International Journal of Play offers soundings of the field and an encouragement to venture still deeper in accounting for change through time, the very currency of historical enquiry and a potential wide-angle corrective to accounts of play concerned exclusively with contemporary themes.
History
Publication title
International Journal of Play
Volume
5
Pagination
227-229
ISSN
2159-4937
Department/School
College Office - College of Arts, Law and Education
Publisher
Routledge
Place of publication
United Kingdom
Repository Status
Restricted
Socio-economic Objectives
Other culture and society not elsewhere classified