“If You Ever See This Video, We're Probably Dead”—A Boy's Own Heterotopia (Notes From An Inner London Playground)

Abstract

This article draws on a 2-year research project focusing on children's playground games, and their relationship to popular media, in an inner London primary school. Extensive video recording of playground events was employed in the research. In addition, the children were invited to participate in documenting their own play using video camcorders. The article examines two inter-related videos made by one 11-year-old boy. Together, they provide one example of pretend play scenarios rendering the “safe” playground a location for the experience of threat and danger, attack and pursuit. Play of this kind is interpreted as a form of dramatic staging of the self at risk. The analysis suggests that in constructing a narrative fantasy of risk and vulnerability the boy also explores and exercises control. Emotionally, such a “heterotopian” transformation of the playground is exciting and pleasurable. Drawing eclectically and constructively on popular media sources, the play scenario further enables him to dramatise the social relations of the playground and, in particular, to negotiate power and control between adults and children and between children of different ages.