Guest editorial: Playful literacies across ages and contexts: new horizons for pleasure, affect, and living texts

Playful literacies across ages and contexts: new horizons for pleasure, affect, and living textsDuring the COVID-19 pandemic, educators observed increased student stress and disconnection in formal learning environments, whereas young people turned to playing, gaming and collaborative writing to cultivate connections during this upheaval.Educational researchers' interest in extracurricular youth literacy practices recognizes the many benefits youth derive from their play in spaces that are largely unrecognized as productive learning sites.As editors of this special issue, we embrace play within and outside the classroom.We join critical scholars who argue that constructing learning spaces without attention to youth play, pleasure, desire and joy can reify inequitable learning environments that silence youth literacies, exclude their cultural practices and deaden their desire for education (Muhammad, 2020;Kirkland, 2013).The presence of and engagement with others in playful spaces provides opportunities to take individual or collective action (Wohlwend, 2018), motivation for affect-laden reading and writing practices (Burnett and Merchant, 2020) and contexts for reflection and feedback (Magnifico et al., 2015).Yet, for older learners, and increasingly for children, play is often rigidly constructed in relation to neoliberal, Eurocentric conceptions of value (Ahmed, 2020), productivity and use (Vossoughi et al., 2016).For instance, we have heard defenses of play and games that directly connect to engendering design thinking, building engineering mindsets and preparing for careers in STEM industries (Kim and Johnson, 2021;Shaffer, 2006;Yoon, 2014).This special issue challenges these normalized conceptualizations as we play with literacies theory and practice across varied ages, media and contexts to ask how literacy studies can reinvigorate perspectives on play at a time when its value has come again to the fore.We wonder: how might educators better understand playful literacies as a vital outlet for pleasurable discovery, socialization and community buildingwithin and beyond formal education and neoliberal notions of use?How might scholars broaden and critique the predominantly Eurocentric conceptions of play that pervade literacy research?To answer these questions, this issue highlights play as a humanizing element of literacies education, across the life span and across environments and contexts.We are excited to share this collection and offer new visions of how play can provide space(s) for children, adolescents, adults and teachers to think beyond traditional academic structures to imagine more joyful possibilities.Article authors explore the critical potentials of playful literacies and the power of affective pedagogies, highlighting the intertextual nature of play.Findings show how players use play objects in dynamic and skilled ways to make meaning in virtual and real spaces and playscapes.Individually and collectively, these articles illustrate how play can challenge neoliberal ideas about teaching and learning (e.g.play is most useful when it prepares youth for future work), as well as bring joy.