About Unit of Play

Established in 2012, The Unit of Play (UoP) is a transdisciplinary unit, based in the Department of Sociology. Its main activities are co-ordinating and developing a research focus within the Department through the hosting of conferences, reading groups, research projects, salons, seminars, workshops as well as supporting doctoral research.

The research focus is oriented around the collaborative exploration and incubation of radically new ideas, practices, and proposals that cut across established disciplinary, theoretical, methodological, and thematic boundaries and concerns of the social sciences, arts and humanities.

Mission

The Unit of Play is so named to convey the germination and cultivation of engagements with new events, problems, ideas and possibilities that demand creative, playful and collaborative engagements; novelties that are transversal to, and therefore challenge, pre-established allegiances.

Central to the UoP’s mission is, therefore, the permanent enlargement of both scholarly and public imaginations, understandings, and possibilities for action and intervention, by organising activities and projects that enable novel, creative and speculative proposals and conceptions to be rigorously explored, imaginatively played and experimented with, and progressively consolidated.