Play Research Laboratory

We champion bold, transdisciplinary research that investigates play as a powerful world-shaping force which is never fully knowable. Using inventive, philosophically playful methods, and by collaborating across communities, we research how play happens when play is taken seriously.

We are based at the Arts, Health and Wellbeing Centre in University of Gloucestershire’s City Campus in Gloucester.

What we do

We explore play as an indication of being and becoming.

We investigate how play emerges within the arts, playwork, sport, wellbeing, and research, in ways that recognise but also go beyond using play as a useful tool.

Recognising that play can never be fully known, we work with play on its own terms, attending to the aesthetic and affective ecologies that arise in the play of human and more-than-human worlds. Because we are interested in how play emerges, and how it generates meanings, intensities, and relations that exceed human intention, and sometimes move against it, our methods are philosophically playful.

Our research supports curiosity, wonder, and risk-taking, without demanding that play justifies itself.

Our research takes play seriously.

Playful research produces forms of knowledge that conventional research frameworks or funding models often overlook or cannot easily accommodate, and allows for new questions, forms of participation, and emergent modes of knowledge. Games-as-research, musical improvisations, embodied practice, sensory exploration, mappings, innovative data collection, and the anarchiving of data assist in exploring the aproductive, unexpected, and sometimes unruly qualities through which play reshapes understanding.

We collaborate.

We are committed to advancing transdisciplinary research on play, and to supporting playful, speculative approaches across research, policy, and practice. Our expertise is in ethical and philosophical issues in sport, playwork, politics of space for play, children’s musical play, creative ecologies, and the material, social, and atmospheric environments that support playful experience.

We play with play on its own terms, as a generative, unpredictable, and often aproductive mode of living and relating that exceeds any singular purpose. To that end, we play alongside children, educators, artists, communities, playworkers, and organisations, researching how play unfolds in real settings, and exploring how play shapes experiences, relations, and environments, beyond narrowly instrumental parameters.

Current work

The Play Research Laboratory is shaping a portfolio of research focused on play-for-play’s sake in creative health practices, aiming to develop imaginative, empirically grounded, and philosophically adventurous accounts of what play does, and how play transforms the worlds it meets. To that end we are working with schools, play projects and community arts partners, employing creative methods and playful inquiry as a rigorous research approach.

We have a particular interest in creative approaches to data collection, and the use of anarchiving of data as a feed-forward mechanism for future research.