Philosophers for centuries and across traditions have turned to aesthetic play manifested in and through art forms as means to give expression to and interrogate the encounter between self and other. The location, purpose, and lived world of the knowing subject are addressed from multiple perspectives, but all value the arts for their capacities to reveal the “in-between” space of self and other. Artworks, including site-specific art, installations, quilts, photography, physical-media performance, and film, become mediums to explore aesthetic engagement, the workings at play. This book project reveals that there is much to be gained from the elemental nature of play and its presence and potential within curriculum as lived in educative settings. Play, understood as dynamic interchange across self and other(s), lives at the conjuncture of body-world. Play concomitantly confronts the immediacies of the world as lived in and envisions the world being created. Thus, to learn about other(s) and in turn self, to create and concomitantly be created, is the elemental play integral to the movement of thinking inherent within curriculum as complicated conversation.



· It matters that teachers do not know the formative matters of play and thus the complicated curricular conversation is a non-realized possibility.
· It matters that students do not get to play within complicated curricular conversations encountering and navigating differences through interaction, deliberation, and debate.

PLAY IS THE THING that brings aesthetic curricular complications near educators and their students, making the lived consequences very vivid, tangible, and possible.Please join us from 12:00-1:30 in Mabel Lee Hall 270.