The result of a unique research project exploring the relationship between children's vernacular play cultures and their media-based play, this collection challenges two popular misconceptions about children's play: that it is depleted or even dying out and that it is threatened by contemporary media such as television and computer games. A key element in the research was the digitization and analysis of Iona and Peter Opie's sound recordings of children's playground and street games from the 1970s and 1980s. This framed and enabled the research team's studies both of the Opies' documents of mid-twentieth-century play culture and, through a two-year ethnographic study of play and games in two primary school playgrounds, contemporary children's play cultures. In addition the research included the use of a prototype computer game to capture playground games and the making of a documentary film. Drawing on this extraordinary data set, the volume poses three questions: What do these hitherto unseen sources reveal about the games, songs and rhymes the Opies and others collected in the mid-twentieth century? What has happened to these vernacular forms?
How are the forms of vernacular play that are transmitted in playgrounds, homes and streets transfigured in the new media age? In addressing these questions, the contributors reflect on the changing face of childhood in the twenty-first century - in relation to questions of gender and power and with attention to the children's own participation in producing the ethnographic record of their lives.
Edited by:
Chris Richards,
Andrew Burn
Series edited by:
Professor Claudia Nelson
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: New edition
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 14mm
Weight: 566g
ISBN: 9781409450245
ISBN 10: 1409450244
Series: Studies in Childhood, 1700 to the Present
Pages: 238
Publication Date: 05 March 2014
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Primary
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Contents: Children’s playground games in the new media age, Andrew Burn; The Opie recordings: what’s left to be heard?, Laura Jopson, Andrew Burn and Jonathan Robinson; ’That’s how the whole hand-clap thing passes on’: online/offline transmission and multimodal variation in a children’s clapping game, Julia C. Bishop; Rough play, play fighting and surveillance: school playgrounds as sites of dissonance, controversy and fun, Chris Richards; The relationship between online and offline play: friendship and exclusion, Jackie Marsh; Remixing children’s cultures: media-referenced play on the playground, Rebekah Willett; The game catcher: a computer game and research tool for embodied movement, Grethe Mitchell; Co-curating children’s play cultures, John Potter; Postscript: the people in the playground, Chris Richards and Andrew Burn; Index.
Andrew Burnis a Professor in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at the Institute of Education, University of London. Chris Richards, also of the Department of Culture, Communication and Media, has recently retired. Andrew Burn, Laura Jopson, Jonathan Robinson, Julia C. Bishop, Chris Richards, Jackie Marsh, Rebekah Willett, Grethe Mitchell, John Potter.
Reviews for Children's Games in the New Media Age: Childlore, Media and the Playground
'The editors and their contributors bring the understanding of children, play and media to new levels with carefully formulated, insightful and sensitive research that refuses to dwell in the comfort of the standard categories and fears which so often dominate discussions of this topic. In the process, Children's Games in the New Media Age helps reclaim children's play as a living, ongoing and generative site of culture.' Daniel Thomas Cook, Rutgers University, USA, author of The Commodification of Childhood
