Between play and the quotidian: inscriptions of monstrous characters on the racialised bodies of children

Abstract

Despite critiques pointing out that racism has become normalised in early childhood settings, relatively little attention has been paid in such contexts to the everyday practices in which racial inequities are made. In seeking to interrogate the ways in which racism roosts in the routine, this article interrogates quotidian responses to children’s playful activity, drawing on data generated in an ethnographic study in a London-based nursery. The article argues that the imaginative characters players embody become ‘fixed’ on particular children – when these characters coincide with reified assumptions about the raced, classed, and gendered body – whilst serving as mobile resources for others. Such reification, which is a concentration of complex historic and contemporary social relations in the political economy, is not only harmful and unjust but limits understandings of racialisation and inequity.     

博弈论与企业营销策略分析

从博奕论的基本理论出发,分析了市场经济中企业管理的各种影响因素,包括参与人、行动、信息、战略、支付、结果与均衡等。利用博奕方法对企业营销的策略进行了探讨,提出企业要在市场竞争中立于不败之地,应采取既竞争又合作的方式。     

“费”的博弈论观

:各种形式的乱收费直接导源于政府公共支出的不断膨胀。从理论上来看 ,收费过程表现为一种各经济行为主体相互之间的博弈 ,并且都存在各自的优超策略从而实现均衡。现实中的博弈虽然有异于理论上的博弈 ,但同样存在各自的优超策略 ,从而同样可以实现优超策略均衡。在收费制度的改革过程中 ,政府政策的目标区域即是这种处于纳什均衡的博弈结局状态空间     

Using Sand Tray to Facilitate College Students' Career Decision‐Making: A Qualitative Inquiry

Career decision‐making can be a challenging and stressful process for college students, and career counselors can be instrumental in helping college students to ease this process. Sand tray, an expressive, play therapy technique, offers career counselors a potentially useful method in this regard. The authors examine the use of sand tray to promote the career decision‐making process. Four undergraduate college students engaged in a sand tray intervention designed to promote career decision‐making. In the final session, students participated in an interview and had the opportunity to review and reflect on their sand tray photographs. Results of a phenomenological‐based analysis revealed 5 themes: (a) initial skepticism, (b) helpfulness, (c) awareness, (d) self‐expression, and (e) continued work. Career counselors may use this unique, creative approach to help clients who are stuck in the career decision‐making process. Future research may include examining the use of sand tray with other interventions, as well as examining intervention effectiveness on career outcome variables.     

Children's Media‐referenced Games: The Lived Culture of Consumer Texts on a School Playground

This article analyses empirical data including observations, videos and interviews from an ethnographic study of a multilingual, multiethnic school playground in London, UK. The analysis examines social uses of media references in playground games, drawing on literature in the field of consumer culture. The main argument is that children's consumer culture is constituted on the playground within media‐referenced play through a combination of creating distinctions and building affiliations. The article addresses a gap in the literature in the fields of sociology and anthropology of consumer culture which largely construct children's consumer culture as exceptional to or derived from adult consumer culture.     

Evaluation of therapeutic play: a challenge for research

There is increased pressure on practitioners offering therapy to troubled children to provide evidence of efficacy of their interventions. However, current research has not yet provided the necessary evidence. There are considerable difficulties creating a quantitative research design which excludes all relevant variables and produces unequivocal data. Quantitative research, which mainly takes the form of narrative case studies, provides ample anecdotal evidence, but there is, as yet, no comprehensive review of these data nor clear conclusions drawn. It is also necessary to consider the purpose of a narrative case study: few claim to be objective or provide a comparative analysis of a given intervention. None of the research currently available includes the opinions of experiences of children.     

Building a System of Indicators to Evaluate the Right of a Child to Play

This study presents the results of a research project whose objective is to propose measures to evaluate the right of children to engage in play, as recognised in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. After exhausting documentation and statistical sources, a lack of measures related to this right was clear. This led to the formation of discussion groups about play with schools, families and social agents. From this, an initial matrix was developed and submitted to experts who selected the most suitable measures. This resulted in the SIDERJU matrix, composed of measures for the structure, process and result.     

Play and learn: Children's agency through the COVID-19 pandemic in Mozambique

Social distancing, one of the measures adopted in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, profoundly impacted on the lives of children. The consequences were, however, not homogenous. By focusing on the daily practices of 41 Mozambican children aged 3–10, we consider how differences in socioeconomic backgrounds led children to respond to the social restrictions in ways that made sense to them. Inspired by Abebe (2019), we identify how the interruptions of daily routines enabled specific instances of agency on children's part. These, we argue, produce new forms of continuity.     

Security of Attachment as a Predictor of Symbolic and Mentalising Abilities: A Longitudinal Study

The development of symbolic and mentalising abilities was examined in 33 children whose security of attachment had been assessed in infancy. It was found that securely attached children: (i) were better able to incorporate an experimenter's play suggestions into their sequences of symbolic play at 31 months; and (ii) performed better on a version of Wimmer and Perner's (1983) unexpected transfer task at age 4. There was also evidence of superior mentalising abilities among the secure group at age 5, despite no group differences being found in general cognitive ability. We suggest that these security-related differences might be related to mothers' propensity to treat their securely attached children as individuals with minds. In support of this hypothesis, mothers in the secure group adopted more sensitive tutoring strategies, and were more likely to describe their children in terms of their mental characteristics. Possible developmental pathways linking security of attachment in infancy with subsequent development were investigated using path analyses.