Youth and Play: World-Making in the Real and the Imagined

This introductory chapter provides an overview and analysis of literatures engaging with the study of youth, cultural practice, and play. Using Wyn’s Chap. 1, “Thinking About Children and Youth” “relational metaphor” as an organizing principle, this chapter identifies new theoretical orientations in children and youth studies that situate young peoples’ cultural practices within a larger repertoire of political actions unfolding in response to an increasingly unequal and ecologically precarious world. Play emerges as a key element in the evolving methodology of youth studies research, with decolonizing and arts-based methodologies arising as significant approaches toward taking seriously “the imagined” in exploring the multiple “reals” of young peoples’ lives. Also surfacing across this survey are themes of “the activist turn” and the “postdigital” in shaping the ways in which young people are at once playfully confronting the unjust systems and structures that determine their lived experiences and creating new worlds in which they can thrive.