Play as a Method for Imagining Otherwise: Critically Engaging Research Imaginaries Through Improvisation

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session 32
  In Roundtable Session: New Methods for Rethinking Research, Design, and Activism

Abstract

We examine play as a method that engages research imaginaries by generating questions, facilitating connections, and prompting movement, rather than by reinscribing fixed inquiry processes and reifying the production of knowledges. Using ethnographies of globalization, nexus analysis, and affect theory framing, we conceptualize educational theories and paradigms as interwoven with social and cultural imaginaries, or collective visions for idealized communities that researchers enact and materialize through tacitly-shared understandings. Play provides a means of unsettling the explicit and hidden knowledges and tacit expectations to make the solidified approaches in our familiar theories both visible and malleable. This methodological inquiry offers conceptual and practical contributions to research, teaching, and inquiry that involves engaging across difference (difference of knowledges, cultures, ages).

Authors

• Carmen L. Medina, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Mia Perry, University of Glasgow

• Karen E. Wohlwend, Indiana University - Bloomington