Hello again everyone! We’re about to have our next meetup in London, so we’ll hopefully see a few of you there at Imperial (we’re fully booked, so if you haven’t got a space, sorry!)
The Journal of Play in Adulthood, a diamond open access journal covering play and playfulness in adults, is looking for new editorial board members, who will also act as Associate Editors, to help us maintain a rigorous, supportive and timely peer review process. Full details on the journal’s site. We set the journal up specifically so we could have a dedicated journal for adult rather than childhood play / playfulness as PLA people struggled to find appropriate journals to write for! www.journalofplayinadulthood.org.uk/news/179/
(We’ve also had a nice flurry of articles published and more still coming through, for this year’s 3 issues! Our standard open issue, the Special Issue (SI) on Playful Leadership, and the SI on Table-top games for learning.)
PLUS!!! Another SI call for papers is now launched, guest edited by Mathias Poulsen and the Counterplay community – “And So We Play… : Living better lives together through play. A Counterplay Special Issue.” It emerges emerges from CounterPlay ’26, an international play festival, but welcomes everyone to contribute in the spirit of the festival. CounterPlay seeks to cultivate rich, diverse landscapes of play, where we can come together as a play community to explore one central question: “How might play help us live better lives together, nurturing both human and more-than-human flourishing?”. Full details on the journal’s site.
Call for Abstracts: International Council for Children’s Play (ICCP) – 29th World Play Conference 2027
Oxford Brookes University, England, 23–25 June 2027, Play in the 21st Century
The International Council for Children’s Play (ICCP) is now accepting abstract submissions for its 29th World Play Conference.
Abstract submission deadline: 15 January 2027
Submit your abstract via the conference website
In the 21st Century, play is a multi-disciplinary field of study. We welcome contributions from fields such as arts and the creative industries, anthropology, sociology, psychology, education, playwork, urban planning, history, philosophy, and beyond. This conference seeks to stimulate a multidisciplinary exchange of knowledge and experience, and abstracts are welcome from researchers studying play from any discipline. We welcome submissions from individuals and small groups, for both presentations and poster presentations.
RE:PLAY Online Conference: Playful Learning in Practice
Join us on Wednesday 9 December 2026, 10am-4pm, for a day of short talks and hands-on playful activities from the RE:PLAY community. Fellows from the RE:Design, Case Study and Learning Design strands will share what happened when they brought play into their higher education teaching, including what worked, what didn’t, and what they’d do differently. The day opens with a keynote from Professor Rosie Jones, Director of Student and Library Services at Teesside University. Two sessions run in parallel in every slot from 11:00 to 15:30, so you can mix talks and activities to build your own programme. There’s also a live Padlet for memes and hot takes on playful learning misconceptions.
Register on Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/
And finally, many congratulations to longstanding PLA member Rosie for becoming Professor Rosie Jones!