SERIOUS PLAY: READING PLAY, WRITING CULTURE
“In our play we reveal what kind of people we are”
- Ovid
“It is not that relation to seriousness which directs us away from play,
but only seriousness in playing makes the play wholly play”
- Hans Gadamer
Poets, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists have long been fascinated with that ubiquitous, yet hard to define, human behavior: play. A wide range of activities – fantasy, make believe, sports, gambling, verbal banter, carnivals, roughhousing, theatrical and musical performance – can all be categorized as games and/or play. What do these disparate social behaviors have in common? In short, what characterizes play and what, as Ovid suggested 2,000 years ago, can it tell us about the human condition?
In this course we will “play” with one of the primary goals of social science writing: advancing our understanding of how and why people act the way they do in certain social settings. Our work will begin with examining how different theorists have attempted to define, categorize and explain the significance of play in human culture and society. In the first half of the semester, your weekly short response papers to these readings and our seminar discussion will prepare you for your major writing project. This project will entail making use, in creative and interesting ways, of what other scholars have written in order to design and conduct a pilot field study of a form of play of your choosing. Through a set of sequential assignments you will learn how to write a literature review that supports a research proposal and how to apply theory in analyzing primary data (generated from observations, participation and interviews). This process will lead you through the steps social scientists take in designing, investigating and presenting a field report to the public. Each assignment builds on the previous assignment and at each stage you will workshop your writing with your classmates in a process of drafting, revising and editing.
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