Ludic geographies: not merely child’s play

Abstract

More often than not, play is assumed to be the activity of children. To date, this has limited academic engagements with play as a significant geographical concern in its own right. This paper challenges the common association of play with children through discussion of three frames of reference – play and the everyday, the politics of play, and how play exceeds representation – that are particularly instructive when developing broader conceptualisations of this phenomenon. In sketching out a broader space for ludic, or playful, geographies I am able to mark the critical and ethical potential of play, discussed here as a form of coming to consciousness and a way to be otherwise, and the cultivation of a mode of ethical generosity.