Playful Participation (Special Issue of Conjunctions)

In 2015 we began, in collaboration with the NGO CounterPlay, to prepare a call for papers on playful participation. Due to the collaboration with CounterPlay we decided to invite both academics and practitioners to contribute. We knew that this would result in very diverse forms of articles. But what we didn’t expect was the interest from academics to publish articles on the kinds of work that they do in collaboration with practitioners. These kinds of collaborations are often difficult to fit into the normal form of academic publications. The result of our call was thus a number of articles that are examples of the kinds of transdisciplinary ventures that Conjunctions was launched to investigate. The articles are examples of collaborations between different kinds of participants, disciplines and institutions. Taking this transdisciplinary approach as a starting point the articles in this issue investigate what playful participation is, how playful encounters might motivate participation, to what extent playful participation can be utilised for e.g. cultural or educational purposes and how playfulness challenges pre-established norms of participation.

The rest of the articles in this volume will be published in the fall of 2016.