The Playtrack Research Group invites interested authors to submit abstracts for consideration for a special issue on Learning, Breaking, Making: Analysing Processes of Play. The Special Issue is linked to the Playtrack 2020 conference on the same topic. 

Link to the Special Issue:
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/13410/learning-breaking-making-analyzing-processes-of-play#overview

Link to the Playtrack Conference: 
https://interactingminds.au.dk/projects/playtrack/

About the Special Issue

Within play research, two oppositely directed narratives seamlessly co-exist. On the one hand, play is described as an optimized form of the learning activity that helps children and adults reduce the uncertainties they encounter in the world so that they, over time, may navigate it with more ease. On the other hand, however, play is also considered to be a creative and somewhat disruptive activity that facilitates novel behavioral patterns and innovative breakthroughs by changing and manipulating the environment and by breaking down traditional rules of conduct. Satisfactory models of play have to account for both of these aspects. They have to explain why it is that play is as much about learning rules as it is about breaking and making them.
This year, the Interacting Minds Centre (IMC) at Aarhus University, Denmark, is organizing the second international PLAYTrack Conference on the theme “Learning, breaking, making: analyzing processes of play.” The conference invites scholars to explore and analyze the dual nature of playful processes on individual and societal levels and discuss the implications this may have for research, education, and innovation.
This Research Topic is intended to capture the outcome and development following the event. Covering topics such as fun, naughtiness, norms, surprise generation, transgression and playing with rules, we welcome contributions from a range of researchers from a multitude of disciplines that each explores and analyses the dual nature of playful processes. By mixing psychological, sociological, anthropological, and educational approaches to play, we are aiming to explore the effects of such processes on individual and societal levels and discuss the implications this may have for development, education, innovation, and research.

Keywords: play, playfulness, learning, cognitive sciences, psychology, playful processes, PLAYTrack Conference

Editors: 

• Andreas Roepstorff (Interacting Minds Centre, Denmark)
• Andreas Lieberoth (Interacting Minds Centre, Denmark)
• Katrin Heimann (Interacting Minds Centre, Denmark)
• Marc Malmdorf Andersen (Interacting Minds Centre, Denmark)
• Kate Cowan (University College London, UK) 
• Doris Pui-Wah Cheng (Tung Wah College, Hong Kong)
• Ben Fincham (University of Sussex, UK)