“The audience has decided…”: Children's Television Play as a Socio-Material Assemblage

In this article we revisit a data set of children's (between 6 and 17 years of age) play and peer interactions collected in 2001. We specifically focus on their engagement with the Big Brother/ Gran Hermano (GH) television show. We draw on sociological studies of childhood and recent socio-material and multimodal research on play and media to examine three dimensions of GH play: how these episodes of television play allowed the children to resignify their physical environment, how children creatively appropriated media scripts, and how GH play allowed to transform the research ecology of the study. We used this analysis to discuss how children's media and spontaneous play can be interpreted as a socio-material assemblage.