The potential of play evades definition. No matter how a form of play is described, recorded and delimited, its representation and evaluation do not completely overlap with its experience.

Such potential can transform or disrupt public life: football fans, for instance, share their experiences before and after the match in the streets and city outside the stadium. But just as permitting such potential can have its risks, so can attempts to police or contain it. In In the Shadow of Tomorrow (1935), Johan Huizinga warned of a world where the experience of play becomes indistinct from its rationalisation.

He was concerned how the ritualised politics of 1930s Europe was becoming a key component of social control. Perhaps we can make similar observations in the contemporary public sphere, one in which labour and leisure becomes indistinct in social media platforms, or in office spaces that mix work and rest facilities to blur the distinction between contracted hours and overtime. As soon as play becomes defined, delimited or rationalised, so is its public and their behaviour.

Rather than seek to define play, we therefore perhaps get closer to understanding it at the point when it exceeds its purported rhetorics, functions, limits and uses, in so doing finding and defining new public spaces or communities. This symposium will therefore bring together scholars in the social sciences and humanities to ask how the potentials of play can operate in public life. We will consider what the consequences are of extending play beyond any defined or intended limits: how it can become integrated with the everyday, the trivial with the serious, the imaginary with the real, the sacred with the profane.