Game on! Collaborative research and resistance through play

In 2019, we conducted a collaborative self-study using improv writing games as our method. Our game play became both a reflective device for our data generation and a structural device for our collaboration and our research writing. This form of collaborative self-study encouraged us to approach our research and our writing with the life-affirming and cooperative intent that personally motivates our work, rather than the self-aggrandising and competitive games of so much of academic life in the neoliberal university. In this sense, it offered not only an approach to collaborative self-study, but also an approach to scholar activism and an experience of genuine collaboration. In this conceptual chapter, we share our developing understanding of how improv game play can work to support purposeful collaboration in self-study research. Specifically, we explore the sense in which: play is a stance; play is a sense-making process; play is pedagogical; play is an attitude; play is a relational dynamic; and how particular kinds of games encourage reflection and discovery.