Everyday assemblages, affect and agency: Children’s intra-actions with smartphones in outdoor play

This thesis uniquely explores how children (10-13), and smartphones engage in mutually constituted outdoor play and critically examines how combinations of environments and technologies assemble to provide playful moments in everyday lives. It demonstrates how modern, networked childhoods are still full of play and makes the case that this new normal is no less important than any other childhoods in any other space and time. An ethnographic methodology is used, with observations from an adventure playground supplemented with focus groups and a reflective log. The research contributes to debates in children’s geographies, childhood studies, playwork and play theory, around notions of mediation, the ludic, everyday politics, and embodiment.