Agentic Play and Playful Agency in Higher Education

Contemporary debates about higher education present and futures increasingly foreground questions of collective agency: how students, educators, researchers, and institutions might act together to imagine, negotiate, and enact alternative futures amid uncertainty, precarity, and complexity. Within these debates, play and playfulness are often invoked as promising pedagogical and collaborative approaches, yet they are often under-theorised, risking instrumentalisation and reduction to motivation, creativity, or engagement. This paper asks: How might play and playful activities and spaces foster experiences of collective agency?

The paper develops a conceptual distinction between agentic play and playful agency as two interrelated but analytically separable modes through which collective agency may emerge. Drawing on philosophical and educational theories of play and playfulness (Bateson, 1972; Fink, 2016; Nachmanovitch, 2024; Sicart, 2014, 2023; Skovbjerg, 2025), the paper begins by clarifying their relationship, which is often treated as interchangeable but has distinct ontological, contextual, and experiential qualities. While play is commonly associated with bounded activities, rules, or frames, playfulness is approached here as a qualitative mode of being and relating, characterised by freedom, openness, vulnerability, expression, ambiguity, and disruption. These qualities are explored specifically in the context of higher education, where agency is frequently constrained by curricular, institutional, and epistemic norms.

Playful agency is conceptualised as agency that takes on the qualities of playfulness. Here, collective agency is not primarily enacted through intentional control or goal-directed action, but by becoming attuned to one another (Lybke, 2025) through playful activities that experiment with shared openness and a willingness to be affected. Playful agency foregrounds how agency can feel and be sensed: tentative, exploratory, relational, and emotionally resonant. It emerges in moments when participants collectively suspend certainty, invite ambiguity, and allow something unforeseen to happen together. Such agency is often fragile and temporary, yet meaningful in how it reshapes relations and possibilities. Agentic play, by contrast, refers to forms of play that take on the qualities of agency. In this mode, play becomes a way to actively manifest, rehearse, and negotiate agency through play actions, scenarios, and material engagements. Agentic play foregrounds how play can function as a mode of inquiry and intervention, enabling participants to explore “what could be otherwise” by enacting, materialising, or collectively staging it. While playful agency emphasises being-together, agentic play emphasises doing-together through playful forms.

The conceptual discussion is grounded in empirical and design-based research examples from higher education. These include playful learning activities centred on objects, materialities, and tangible artefact-making, in which students collaboratively construct three-dimensional forms to explore interdisciplinary academic problems and each other’s perspectives, such as mood spaces that materialise shared atmospheres of exploration and knowing (Holflod, 2023). The paper also examines playful spaces created by educators and researchers, such as “play bonfires,” where scenarios, memories, and speculative futures are collectively evoked, including engagements with hauntological themes of lost pasts and futures (Fisher, 2014). Lastly, the paper exemplifies the concepts of agentic play and playful agency, and student experiences with collective agency, through a recently concluded three-year European research and innovation project that examined and designed for youth’s empowered participation through co-creative game design events (Holflod et al., 2024).

In the discussion, the paper explores how both playful agency and agentic play can foster moments, experiences, and senses of collective agency through shared vulnerability, relational attunement, and what might be described as a soulful connection (Todres, 2007). It further argues that playing with objects and artefacts does not just mediate collaboration but permeates and reconfigures relationships (Holflod, 2023), enabling agency to be explored and distributed across both human and nonhuman participants from diverse social worlds. The paper concludes by discussing implications for higher education pedagogy and collaboration, suggesting that attending to the qualitative, affective, and relational dimensions of play and playfulness can enrich how collective agency is understood, designed for, and experienced in higher education futures.

References:
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