IN-PERSON Prague Research & Teaching Conference

Abstract

With the commonplace wholesale redundancies, severances, and the flash closure of courses in the UK’s further higher education institutes, qualities previously associated with creativity – the contingent, ad hoc, make-do, DIY, improvisational, dynamic, reactive, self-initiated, and so on – are now the “dilemmas” that underfunded, understaffed creative courses and uninspired, uninterested students find themselves in. Seen as a dilemma, the qualities are symptomatic of precarity. On the other hand, when perceived as a “condition” these are the necessary qualities for play. The present article argues that a ludo-centric approach to the failing project of culture in the UK’s further higher education institutes is an urgent, agonistic act of dissensus. Play, we argue, is a legitimate form of processual and transformative learning incapable of being resolved in predictable, nor traditionally productive outcomes. As such, it is a setting where success is rarely quantifiable or guaranteed. From this position, for the sake of replenishing our cultural capital, this article explores how to retool our classrooms and rewire complex relationships through a collective practice of nurturing cultures of making. In arguing for play against precarity, the snide image of the university as an ivory tower – a removed place of make-believe – is repossessed as a fertile, ruinous zone of compassionate education.