A digital ecosystem, fueled by serendipity. Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
“Is there such a thing as too much freedom in play?” In my essay analyzing Tim Edensor’s and his colleague’s “Playing In Industrial Ruins” from “Urban Wildscapes”, and the student, Free Rein’s, account of her childhood experience of play, the answer I gave to this question was yes.
In the essay, “Playing in Industrial Ruins: Interrogating Teleological Understandings of Play in Spaces of Material Alterity and Low Surveillance,” Edensor and three other authors argue that
an attentiveness to playfulness in industrial ruins offers an opportunity to think about the role of ‘wild’ spaces within the contemporary city, and the potential ‘wildness’ present in more managed urban spaces which might offer possibilities for playful transformation (77).
Henig’s “Taking Play Seriously” assures the main positive effects of play on aspects of neurological growth and physical preparation in response of future but misses to develop deeply on the negative “side effects” of play.
From dorothy kim’s post on Serendip, her recalls of childhood reflect most parents’ concern- kids get too much time for play. There is also arguments about time dispensed on play that “psychologists complain that overscheduled kids have no time left for the real business of childhood: idle, creative, unstructured free play.”(Henig, 1) However, what parents worry about is not exactly the time amount their kids put into play, but the “direction”, which I refer abstractly, kids are playing towards.
Vivian O’Bannon
Jody Cohen
Emily Balch Seminar: Changing Our Story
September 30, 2016
The Many Agents of “Slippage”
As a child, “starfish” loved to enact elaborate scenes with the magic of make-believe. She and her playmates would adopt roles, embodying “feuding sorcerers” one day and “magical princesses” the next. Sometimes they were parents and kids, doctors and patients, or even non-human creatures who would travel through galaxies near and far. In her words, imaginative play was “rewarding” and all she needed was “nothing more than my own imagination to carry them out successfully” (starfish). However, as I explored in my previous essay, experts on play contest that imagination is unlimited and independent. Instead, imaginative play is limited to the framework of the society in which children grow up.
Eighty-five years ago, Enid Cook walked through the halls of Bryn Mawr creating a legacy with a chance at radical change. Fast forward to the present-- where exactly does Bryn Mawr stand with that notion of inclusion? Has it been affirmed or is it only an ailing hope? Through Anne Dalke’s analysis of the concept of “slipping” and the work of Grace Pusy and Emma Kioko on the “Black at Bryn Mawr” tour, an initiative to retrace the absence of black history on campus, it becomes apparent that the school has yet to meet its goals as a liberal and progressive institution.
Environments Effects on Identity
Upon reading my paper, “Sometimes Slips Are Good”, Teju Cole, the author of “The White- Savior Industrial Complex” would disagree with my agreement that slips may benefit a part of society. In Cole’s article he argues that people, especially white privileged people, go out of their way to help others merely to satisfy their own needs of making themselves feel better. In other words, it is only based on selfish motives that people go out of their way to give others aid. In addition to that, many times people also do not try to fix the root problem of an issue, which therefore does not alleviate an issue in a substantial way.
“His good heart does not allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way is, putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for need.” (Cole 7)
At first when I watched the Kony 2012 video, I supported Jason Russell’s non-profit organization, the Invisible Children. I mean, it would be so cruel not to agree that appropriate measures had to be taken to eradicate the atrocities caused by the warlord, Joseph Kony. Placing myself in the Cole’s shoes, would I give a donation in support of the emaciated children? Yes, I would.
Slipping through the Lens of Bloodchild
In Butler’s Bloodchild, slippage was utilized as a method in which unspoken species-specific values were revealed to the audience. Slippage allowed the readers to witness a side of both species that was not directly indicated, and furthermore showed how corrosive the shown interspecies relationship was. Slippage also revealed a disturbing truth about those who were caught between the vastly different beliefs held between differing species. In all, the different types of slippage in Bloodchild exposed an underlying message about the dangerous nature of forcing different cultures to merge in order to hasten progress.