A diffractive expression of an ethics for playwork

by Wendy Russell

Photo: Andrew Higgins

Abstract

The Playwork Principles establish the professional and ethical framework for UK playworkers. They also create contradictions that have an ethical dimension. Following an historical contextualisation, the chapter critiques the assumption of the autonomous rational agent implicit in the Playwork Principles’ understanding of both play and playwork. It reconfigures playwork as relational, affective and affecting, embodied, situated and irreducible to representation in language. Through a diffractive reading of the work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler, it offers a posthuman, nomadic and relational ethics, acknowledging the emergent, ongoing and intra-active co-production of play spaces in which playworkers are already implicated.

Read Dr Russell’s full (pre-proof) chapter* here.

*The author’s submitted version (pre-proof) for inclusion in M. MacLean, W. Russell and E. Ryall (2015) (eds), Philosophical Perspectives on Play, London: Routledge.