This book deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play and explores play in the broadest sense.

It deconstructs traditional developmentalist logic around play where the focus is on what play enables children's bodies and brains to do and become. This book includes contributions from academics and practitioners based in Australia, Canada, Finland, South Africa, the USA and the UK and explores play in the broadest sense, making space for the myriad forms that play takes for both children and adults connected to children in childhood contexts. By broadening the definition and being open to the ways that play emerges through research and pedagogy this book disrupts and extends existing ideas (and practices) in early childhood. The contributors offer alternative ways of thinking about play in childhood, including those emerging from indigenous, posthumanist, feminist new materialist, social semiotic, socio-cultural, aesthetic and multimodal approaches to childhood.

Jayne Osgood is Professor of Education at Middlesex University, UK. She is co-series editor, with Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, of the Feminist Thought in Childhood Research series, and co-series editor, with Mona Sakr of the Postdevelopmental Approaches to Childhood series, both published by Bloomsbury.

Victoria de Rijke is Professor of Education at Middlesex University, UK.