Edited by Anisha Anantpurkar and Pasha Tretyakova
This special issue of The February Journal explores the process of playful knowledge-making. In this Introduction, the issue editors Pasha and Anisha share how that process came together in this volume, across and within contributions. The thematic spotlight is on margins, authority, and the entanglements of fiction and reality.
This article argues that play can function as a legitimate epistemological method: a structured way of generating new knowledge about the world. Drawing on anarchist theory, feminist philosophy, and Science and Technology Studies, the author develops a theory of play as a free, relational, and performative engagement with the world that produces knowledge not through representation but through enactment. Play, in this framework, is characterized by voluntary rule adoption, world-appropriation, and the blurring of boundaries to reveal what is possible rather than merely what is. This argument is grounded in a concrete case study: Probably Not, an iOS application that exploits the statistical uncertainty of machine vision systems to generate critical insight into how AI ‘sees.’ The app demonstrates how a playful method can contribute to critical technology studies by making hidden assumptions in machine learning visible through humorous, rule-breaking interaction. The article positions play as an epistemology of the liminal, the temporary, and the possible.
My co-creator David Ross and I made what we called ‘ethnographic B movies’ as the central element of my doctoral fieldwork. These low budget and cheesy speculative fiction films, written primarily by David, became an opportunity for him to share his ideas of a revolution based on the concept of the Musicality of Reality. The films gave David a chance to perform himself otherwise: no longer on the socio-economic margins, as a failed academic living on a senior’s fixed income, but as a legitimate thinker leading a global movement. Together, we gave into and created a mad world of possibility, a place where I could also become an Other to my ethnographic self, performing a version of my actual self as always unsure about what was happening in the field. In this visual essay, I share a series of film stills in a montage-like fashion and with an accompanying text, to mirror the absurd silliness of our films inspired by the B movie genre. I focus on moments across our filmic output that highlight how giving into playfulness provided very serious self-disclosure opportunities both for David and for myself. By bringing the reader into the space of our films in this way, I want to encourage others to experiment and play with the possibilities of ethnographic becoming afforded by low aesthetic expectations and absurdist creativity.
This article starts with a provocation: can and should we be playfully indifferent to the differences that keep us from being able to trust each other? Can we imagine playing together in fieldwork and beyond in ways that allow our differences to not be made an object of scrutiny? Beginning from a seemingly minor yet weighty utterance—‘I trust you’ by a friend and mentor in Amman, Jordan—I reflect on the preoccupation with difference that can emerge when writing ethnographically about queer life and relations in contexts where visible gender and sexual ‘difference’ is both charged and potentially dangerous. This leads me to consider anthropology’s ambiguous role in both studying and defending the importance of social and cultural difference, and the role of identity politics in decolonial iterations of anthropology. Drawing on Madhavi Menon (2015) and especially Naisargi N. Davé’s (2023) recent theorization of indifference as a queer virtue, alongside María Lugones’s (1987) notion of playfulness as an openness to world-travelling, I develop the concept of ‘playful indifference’ both as a response to the politics of queer relation-building among artists and activists in Amman and as a suggestion as to how we might mobilize playfulness in order to remain open to trusting relations and the possibility of becoming otherwise (Povinelli, 2012). Playful indifference is proposed as a relational ethic and a politics of solidarity that observes, but also willfully disregards, paranoid hyper-attention to positionality and moralizing impulses of difference-making.
With this essay, I creatively and critically celebrate a fusion and confusion of notions of play. Here, I invite you, the reader, to dive into the realm and possibilities of what I call ‘shades of play.’ I base my exploration of shades of play on my performance, The Washing Machine, the Scythe, and I (2025). This work is part of my artistic research series homemade hips, where I entangle ideas of hips and domesticity. Now, together we (you and I) will slip, sweat, shake, and cut while discovering the manner of shades of play.
This article investigates the methodological implications of playing as historical actors within immersive virtual reality (VR) environments. Drawing on a PhD project examining over 20 history-related VR experiences, it combines phenomenological analysis of embodied gameplay with computational distant viewing techniques. The study foregrounds virtual embodiment as both an epistemic tool and a subject of inquiry, showing how first-person interaction with historical environments—ranging from Renaissance Venice in Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR to the lunar mission in Apollo 11 VR—enables researchers to experience history kinesthetically and cognitively. A systematic selection of VR titles illustrates diverse strategies of perspective, interactivity, and narrative framing, highlighting how iconic figures and ‘ordinary’ historical actors are mediated through digital simulations. Phenomenological observations reveal the fragility and situatedness of immersion, where bodily action, system constraints, and unanticipated disruptions co-produce historical meaning. The article argues for a methodological pluralism in digital public history: scholars must oscillate between immersion and analytical distance to understand how VR shapes historical consciousness. Ultimately, playing as a historical actor emerges as a productive research practice, revealing the dynamic negotiation of past and present within immersive media.
Community Portal (2024–) is an instrument for embodied collaborative listening with local and ancestral waters. The Mahicannituck (lower Hudson River), a tidal estuary connecting upstate New York and the Atlantic Ocean, serves as an inspiration and site for this work. The cyclical movement of its waters constitutes a flow towards and away from Indigenous, colonial, cultural, and industrial legacies. This hybrid essay shares fragments of Community Portal’s co-development within these waters and across three participatory design playtests conducted by a community of artists, educators, and high-school-aged youth science fellows. Utilized in game design to elicit user feedback during development, playtesting is presented here as a methodology for the collaborative community design and development of assistive tools that adaptively re-use and re-imagine colonial technologies of science and media. Playtesting with and in these waters presents an opportunity for further collaborative development of technologies that unite social practice, science, and engineering, a process that this essay terms ‘visionary engineering.’
The stand-alone, bounded humanist figure of the individual has long been critiqued by anthropologists, who challenged its exclusionary stakes and its position as the natural starting point of questions and debates in the social sciences. In confronting the shadows of dominant models of being, such as Homo economicus, in their field, anthropologists of welfare and the economic imagination reveal a gap between intended results and the socially complex realities they observe ethnographically, which slip through the abstractions of such models. This article builds on and extends these critical insights by inverting the terms of analysis. Instead of showing how hegemonic economic models of being can be undermined through ethnography, it inquires into what keeps them alive. The contribution suggests a different theoretical point of departure by adopting Sylvia Wynter’s concept of ‘being human as praxis’ (Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). Being human as praxis is a playful experiment that offers generative pathways in thinking beyond the humanist trope of neoliberal subjectivity. It allows us to consider the enactment and regeneration (or not) of dominant mythologies of being human, and their racial ontologies, through an inclusive and dynamic understanding of being human, centered on storytelling and praxis. Grounded in fieldwork at a simulation-based training center in Lyon preoccupied with ‘professional reconversion,’ where play emerges as a praxis of mastery and worldmaking, I argue that Wynter’s conception of humanness as a verb rather than a noun shifts our focus from the trope of autonomous subjects towards a politics of personhood enacted through everyday reproductions of autonomy as symbolic life.
This essay reflects on how play can function as a fruitful methodological orientation in ethnographic research. It draws on my engagement with Bling, an annual Estonian house-music festival known for its immersive environments and ethos of playful co-creation. I first encountered Bling not as a researcher but as a participant, drawn to its joyful atmosphere shaped by music, dance, costumes, and art. Through dancing, building, cooking, and sharing space with others, I became closely involved with the scene surrounding the event. Such participation—what I call playing along with the scene—entailed immersion through affective attunement and collaborative engagement. Only later did I recognize that this immersion had shaped my method of inquiry, as playing along with the scene had created the conditions that gradually informed what became the research. Without a predefined research frame, I set up a video booth at the 2021 festival, inviting participants to record reflections from within the pulse of the event. These recordings later formed the basis for the short documentary That Estonian Bling Thing (2024) and the 100 m² ‘BLING’ section of the exhibition Who Claims the Night? (Estonian National Museum, 2024–2025), co-created with community artists. Drawing on sensory ethnography, the anthropology of experience, and my involvement with the scene, I demonstrate how play, as a mode of immersion in lived experience, can orient ethnographic inquiry. In this process, authority is redistributed, and knowledge emerges not simply about a scene but with it—through affective attunement, co-creation, and the generative force of play.
This is a review of Cia Rinne's (2025) Footnotes: Ein Supplementarium (Schweifhefte, Heft 18).
This epilogue may have some of you confused. Trying to stay true to our impulse to play, it is a result of reading and working playfully. What can playing with the contributions generate for us? This whimsical, unhinged, creative piece is one thing. Dream Believe Achieve, we suppose.
