Postgraduate Conference 2025: Play and Imagination
The 2025 Postgraduate Conference on Friday 23 May will open a conversation on ludic responses to and interpretations of the world, with keynote talks from Professor Tim Ingold and Professor Stephen Scott-Bottoms and a performance by Professor Stephen Scott-Bottoms.
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Play and imagination are radical forces
Amidst an ever-changing backdrop, how can centring scholarship on play and imagination offer accessible, joyful ways to approach the way we do research and disseminate findings, expand and challenge modes of thinking, underscore the necessity of play in learning, and help us creatively reimagine a collective future?
Image: Hartley, B. (2010s) Pathfoot 1 [Photomontage]. University of Stirling Art Collection
Call for papers
We invite researchers in the Arts and Humanities to submit papers centred on Play and Imagination.
Submissions are encouraged, but not limited, to focus on the following topics:
- playful approaches to learning and research, including visual arts, music, and performance;
- translation as a playful and imaginative practice;
- creative modes of disseminating research;
- play as a human right;
- studies of recreation, amusement, and entertainment;
- imagining the role individuals and institutions play in an ever-changing world;
- creative, interdisciplinary reimaginings of the past and a shared future;
- imaginations of alternative worlds and social orders.
Submission guidelines
We welcome submissions from doctoral students for individual and collaborative papers (15 minutes), posters, as well as non-traditional formats.
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words to pgconference@stir.ac.uk by Friday 14 March 2025 along with a brief bio. The 2025 Postgraduate Conference Committee aims to notify proposers about the status of their paper by Friday 11 April 2025.