In early September, we welcome twenty-seven first-semester students, and so begin to enlarge the scope of our game. The arc of the semester plays out largely in the way we imagine—which means that, like all courses (but perhaps more so?) it is full of the unexpected. The students are (mostly) engaged, (mostly) delighted by our frequent jaunts into the city, (mostly) willing to explore both the experiential and theoretical dimensions of our work. They are simultaneously resistant to all of the above, especially as they begin to discover how political it can be to “play.”

Early on, we ask them to use Robin Henig’s “Taking Play Seriously” to reflect on their own childhood experiences of play, and then to consider the relationship between such experiences and their current intellectual life. In response to Henig’s argument that “imaginative play…creates a person…who believes in possibilities…in acting out one’s own capacity for the future,” some of our students offer poignant accounts of being denied this “more diverse and responsive behavioral repertory.”Robin Henig, “Taking Play Seriously,” New York Times, February 17, 2008. Cathy Zhou, who has come to Bryn Mawr from Chengdu, China, writes:

Our students are even more tightly scheduled now, as they figure out how to juggle their new obligations at Bryn Mawr; our invitation to embrace play as a version of intellectual work provokes some grumbling about giving “carefully hoarded time for trips…between working on Saturdays, rehearsing for a play, and finishing homework.”Claire Romaine, “Stubborn Writer,” December 19, 2013 (9:24 p.m.). The students’ reticence is a reminder of the pressures at an academic institution where playful exploration is elusive and seems pitted against the call to accomplish, to own, to earn one’s way through, to support others.

Acknowledging these constraints, we still insist that our students “unbind” from the classroom, go out from the line of seats or the circle of chairs that have (mostly) circumscribed their learning, and begin to engage the world more directly, with less teacherly mediation—and then reflect on what happens. Like Deborah Bird Rose and her co-authors in “Ravens at Play” (a lovely, deep piece on multispecies possibilities for social interaction), we have only inklings, setting out, of the diverse opportunities that may be “both opened up and foreclosed by any kind of play we might choose or be able to engage in with others.”Rose et al., “Ravens at Play,” 341. We saunter out for adventure, planning to make ourselves “at home” in the city. The hard questions of cultural crossing—of access and belonging, appropriation and trespass, the politics of “playing”—are yet to come.

On our first trip, we participate in one of the productions of the Fringe Arts Festival. Headphones on, we sit side-by-side at tables in the reading room of The Free Library of Philadelphia, following cues—some written, some whispered—that guide us through a pile of books in front of us. We are each performer and spectator in The Quiet Volume, a self-generated performance that engages us in a “drama of turning pages, pointing fingers and eerily drifting thoughts,” and so invites us to “listen to what’s going on in our heads when we read.”“The Quiet Volume,” FringeArts, August 2, 2013.

Quickly noticing that a number of our companions at the library tables are not listening to instructions through headphones, our students realize that they are participating in much larger, explicitly inequitable theater, both in the library and on the streets. They began to notice some “cracks” in the classic urban studies texts we’ve assigned them; the theories of Lewis Mumford, George Simmel, Sharon ZukinLewis Mumford, “What Is a City?” Architectural Record (1937); George Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1950); “Sharon Zukin, The Cultures of Cities (1995)”, urbanculturalstudies, May 21, 2012. seem distant from their own experiences, romantic versions of what they are encountering. Another student from China, writing under the name “Everglade,” reports feeling

Throughout this book, we celebrate the serendipity of surprise, advocate for openness to unexpected possibility. We also spend some time on the possible downside of such experiences: something unwelcome could happen, the students may not feel able to say “no” to what they encounter. We don’t attend much, however, to the jolt of awareness of our own limitations, the disappointment in ourselves for not being able to seize a new opportunity. Everglade names such experiences here: how her trip begins playfully, becomes threatening; the value and also the risk of her coming to the city, the sense of exposure this entails.

Everglade reports panic, fear, and disappointment; a classmate describes another unsettling encounter in Philadelphia that leaves her feeling hopeless. Agatha Basia, who has lived in a number of different cities in Africa, Europe, and the U.S., begins her account by challenging Mumford’s observation that “The city…is art; the city…is the theater”:

Like Everglade, unable to make contact with someone who is unsheltered, Agatha places her sense of individual hopelessness in a larger context, believing that multiple social structures—“much more than just the wall of a bathroom stall”—keep her from speaking to her neighbor. On our first trip to the city, “play” has quickly become unsteady, destabilizing, bringing students face to face with social inequities, leaving some of them worried and troubled. We have moved rapidly from the celebration of undirected play, with which our course began, into a range of more complex and subversive forms, both experiential and theoretical. Henig’s claims that “the aim is play itself”—with “unproductivity” its essential aspect, “open actions,” “occasions of pure waste”Henig, “Taking Play Seriously.”—are replaced now by challenging encounters with other people.

We begin to ask if we might use play to unsettle such situations, “to defy orthodoxy and top-down power, and envision a new society.”Pat Kane, “Protean Activism: The Constitutive Politics of Play,” The Play Ethic, July 12, 2009. We read Mary Flanagan’s assertion that “play is never innocent,” follow her accounts of various forms of “critical play,” challenges to the status quo that are intended to shift paradigms, the boundaries of what is permissible.Mary Flanagan, Critical Play: Radical Game Design (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 1–15. Slowly, as the students research a wide range of artists who “play critically,” spend some time themselves alone in silence—first in a cell in Eastern State Penitentiary, next with a work of art they choose at The Barnes Foundation—then map their own trips into the city, exploring it in accord with their own desires and designs, they begin to recognize ways in which being playful in undirected but curious and thoughtful ways might guide them into larger questions, and also into larger meanings.

We now hear named some of the risks of what we are up to. We learn about Jeremy Betham’s concept of “deep play,” reprised first by Clifford Geertz,Clifford Geertz, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). then Diane Ackerman: “any activity in which ‘the stakes are so high that…it is irrational for anyone to engage in it at all, since the marginal utility of what you stand to win is grossly outweighed by the disutility of what you stand to lose.’ ”Diane Ackerman, “Chapter One,” Deep Play (New York: Random House, 1999).

As we begin sharing examples, comparing stories about when we each might have experienced deep play, some students struggle with understanding the role of such “irrational” activity, how appropriate high risk might be in the classroom. I describe teaching as my own preferred form of deep play. A student realizes that she has had the experience of playing deeply at another academic task: Yancy, who has also come to Bryn Mawr from China, and who finds it difficult to speak in class, articulates her own experiences

Slowly, other students begin to engage in writing that is deeply playful. Their work becomes more experimental. Mark and I create “text renderings” of their essays (noting words, phrases, sentences that have “heat,” or “energy”); then they do this for one another. These risky attempts put them into new relation with one another. They make (mostly verbal) mosaics out of Terry Tempest Williams’ fragmented text, Finding Beauty in a Broken World;Terry Tempest Williams, Finding Beauty in a Broken World (New York: Vintage, 2009). then mosaics—(mostly) visual, though one takes the form of a sound trackAgatha Slobada, “Julia of Eyes,” Soundcloud.—to represent their spirited excursions to Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens, then tracking down the street mosaics of Isaiah Zagar.

The students come to understand mosaic as a critical practice, a mode of playing with different juxtapositions of both visual and verbal material.

They learn to play with point of view, sharpening and shifting their “lenses,” making them “distinctive,” then “collective.”

They take more risks in their writing, finding doorways and openings into play. One student says that

Another student, Paola Bernal, finds that writing “without filters”pbernal, “Learning to Write Without Filters,” December 18, 2013 (3:20 p.m.). leads her into sharp political critique, an awareness of how cultural boundaries are policed. Paola appreciates

In Paola’s experience, The Barnes Foundation

Paola and her classmates begin to ask hard questions about intellectual property: should art belong to particular individuals, or be accessible to all? What about forgery, understood as admiration and celebration? What about re-mixing?tomahawk, “The Barnes Foundation and Intellectual Property,” December 1, 2013 (10:33 p.m). On their last foray into Philadelphia, when each student is traveling alone (as it turns out, in the midst of a snowstorm), they are not just playing in but with the city, tracing musical clefs in the snow, making their marks on a landscape where, as Tim Edensor and his colleagues observe, “play may best be conceptualized as always potentially emergent, with the potential to shift the actuality of the moment in unforeseen ways, generating encounters which could always have been otherwise.” Tim Edensor et al., “Playing in Industrial Ruins: Interrogating Teleological Understandings of Play in Spaces of Material Alterity and Low Surveillance,” in Urban Wildscapes, eds. Anna Jorgensen and Richard Keenan (New York: Routledge, 2011), 65–79.

Still emerging for our students, as this semester ends, are the problematics our friend Alice named the summer before: “Who is the ‘We’?” “Whose” is the city? Sited differently, Alice’s questions echo those Lisa Delpit asked twenty years ago, in Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. Delpit argued that process writing approaches fail to provide low-income students with access to the “codes of power” of “Standard” English:

There is a political power game that is…being played, and if they want to be in on that game there are certain games that they too must play… . Only after acknowledging the inequity of the system can the teacher’s stance then be “Let me show you how to cheat!”Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom (1995; rpt. The New Press, New York: 2006), 39–40, 165.

In Delpit’s formulation, play is very serious, its possibilities circumscribed by variable access to power. Our course has been highlighting similar questions: What enables play, we ask again and again—and what prevents it? Who gets to name the stakes at play? Who gets to play in the city, as in the classroom? How much security do “we” need to have, before we are “free” to take the risks of playing freely? Is this never possible? Does play always take place within restraints? And also always entail unpredictable consequences?

Like the unexpected interactions that Deborah Bird Rose, Stuart Cooke, and Thom Van Dooren trace with coyotes, then ravens, our own pedagogical play enters into and sets in motion a precarious, shifting landscape in which we encounter not only others but also ourselves as “strange strangers,” whose gestures puzzle and elude us, eliciting responses we didn’t know we had, restraints we weren’t aware of, hadn’t recognized as necessary. Rose, Cooke, and Van Dooren say they are “willing to test the possibilities of contact, but…at the same time suspicious of where our attention might lead.” Reflecting on the consequences, for other species, of playing with humans, Rose and her colleagues ask,

Was the best gift we could offer actually a restraint—that we would withhold ourselves…our play? We couldn’t play in good faith, because while the game was a transient moment for us, it was a trajectory toward death for [them]… . What we might become in the contact zone was thus constrained… .Rose et al., “Ravens at Play,” 341.

We end our semester with many related questions about our own attempts to “play in the city”: Has our concept of a playground been based on a presumption of naïve users? How transient have our interactions really been? What have been the consequences of our play for those who live in Philadelphia, or for others who may visit there? Should we have played more expansively—tried harder to make contact—or been more constrained? How might we have acted differently, more thoughtfully, more responsibly?

Agatha reprises the time we have spent together by saying that she still feels uncomfortable “about the concept of ‘playing in the city,’ as if the city were a playground. It’s not easy for me to ignore all the hardships and political issues and absurd human drama that is played out in a city… .”Agatha Basia, “Decided. Dreams Collection.” December 17, 2013 (8:57 p.m.).

The experiences of other students lead them, like Agatha, to develop critical perspectives on play, identity, education, the city-suburban divide, social inequities…for these students, now, the “usual conventions of property, commodity and value” no longer pertain. Recognizing play in the city as a space of “productive, generative practices,” “potentially transformative” and “subversive of power,” they offer a strong articulation of what going “outside the classroom” might mean.Edensor et al., “Industrial Ruins,” 65–79. They query the sort of education offered on campus, and invite larger questions about what is “proper” both here and elsewhere.

Mark and I are left, too, with questions about the relationship between risk, privilege, and play. How might locating play outside classrooms mitigate or invite play inside them? At what times and in what places might play be destructive rather than beneficial?