TBS: Play
April 1–3, 2027
& 4 preliminary workshop meetings, TBA
The focus for this year’s symposium will be “Play,” broadly construed. We feel that this is a perfect time to focus on play and its essential roles in human and animal development, cultural expression, and life itself.
Our co-conveners for TBS Play will be:
K. Brandon Barker, Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, affiliate faculty in Cognitive Science
Patricia Pizer, Game Design program, Media School
External fellows will also join us this year.
To apply, please send a CV and a 250-word statement outlining the reasons for your interest and the relevance of your research to this topic to ias@iu.edu.
DEADLINE for applications: Wednesday, June 10, 2026 by 11:59 p.m. EDT.
In a time of great and widespread unease, the idea and practice of play become that much more important for keeping ourselves sane and healthy. Because play is a human universal, crossing many species, humanity can utilize play to bring people together across age, color, and creed to benefit. The benefits are myriad: improved brain plasticity, better coordination, forestalled dementia, strengthened brain development, aiding emotional regulation, improved motor skills, increased resilience. For humans, play is non-trivial. Play boosts problem-solving abilities, creativity, and cognitive flexibility. It helps children understand cause-and-effect and fosters memory functions. Active play (running, climbing) develops gross and fine motor skills, coordination, and balance. At play, children learn empathy, negotiation, cooperation, and emotion regulation. Play can create a safe space for processing trauma or fear. For adults, play relieves stress, improves mental health, fosters innovation, and strengthens relationships. Given play’s association with chance and fate, some have suggested that play mirrors both physical and human nature. That said, play behaviors occur across an impressive range of non-human species, from mammals to birds, to some fish and even insects (bumblebees). All exhibit play behaviors.
Because of these numerous and varied impacts of play, it is a key issue in a broad array of disciplines. Play is integral to media and game studies and remains central to the rise of digital culture. The study of play crosses humanities and social science disciplines, including (but not limited to) philosophy, education, sociology, history, anthropology, literature, and folklore. A science of play arises notably in, for example, psychology, developmental studies, and animal behavior science, and it is important to keep in mind the ways that play supports all forms of conceptual exploration and experimentation. Playfulness thrives as well across the genres of performing, literary, and plastic arts. IUIAS welcomes TBS applications from IUB faculty members at all ranks, from all fields and disciplines, who are interested in thinking about play together.
In addition to the conveners, the group will include approximately 12 participants selected from the pool of applicants and drawn from as diverse a range of disciplines as possible. The group will gather for four meetings during the 2026-27 academic year, followed by a 3-day symposium April 1, 2, and 3, 2027. Group members may also choose to participate in optional related events throughout the year.
During the meetings the participants will share their research and intellectual engagement with the topic of play; collaboratively create a shared intellectual foundation by contributing titles to a common bibliography; discuss related keywords and subtopics from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives; and share questions and thought experiments. Participants are expected to attend all meetings and the symposium, and every effort will be made to choose times that will allow for this.
At the symposium in April, each member will present some kind of evidentiary “artifact,” such as a text, a data set, a model, a case study, an anecdote, or an image that is relevant to the question at hand. Presentations will be followed by broad conversations about the artifacts and the issues attending them, including questions, problems, and possibilities that they pose. The shape of the conversations will depend greatly on the participants and symposium attendees. The symposium aims to generate future research questions and develop a focused plan for documenting outcomes, whether in a white paper, collaboratively authored document, or other scholarly and artistic outputs.
