Blog
Welcome to the Play Observatory! We’re making a collection featuring all kinds of children’s play during the pandemic and beyond - indoors or outdoors, onscreen or offscreen, playing, saying, doing, making. We are really interested in young people’s own views on their play during this unique time in history. Children and adults can send us pictures, videos, sound recordings, drawings or writing. Please play your part in the Play Observatory!
Kate Cowan explains the background to the Play Observatory and our aims for the project.
The videos of talks by the team, and our guest speakers, earlier this year at our symposium on pandemic play are now published online. Please read on to access them directly from the blog… You can also see them all in a Vimeo Showcase (a playlist, in other words!).
The Play Observatory Team has some exciting news!
In the first of our guest blogs, Dr Ceri Houlbrook takes an imaginative journey into the future, asking how children's play during the pandemic could be interpreted through the physical, material objects they've created at this unusual time.
Cath Bannister finds past examples of play informed by illness in the archived papers of folklorists Iona and Peter Opie.
The Play Observatory survey is now live! Cath Bannister discusses what we mean by ‘play’ and what we are collecting.
As a researcher interested in what young people make with digital media I'm looking forward to knowing if and how children have responded to the pandemic through the medium of film. We'd welcome any movies you've made whilst playing during the pandemic.
Yinka Olusoga explains some of the history of researching children’s own ideas about their everyday play.
John Potter explains how we got to the Play Observatory by way of two previous projects on play archives and playgrounds.
