Pretend play and creating spaces (Cobb-Moore, Danvy & Farrell, 2010)

Cobb-Moore, C. Danby, S. & Farrell, A. (2010) Locking the unlockable: Children’s invocation of pretence to define and manage place. Childhood, 17(2=3), 376-395. 

In this paper Charlotte Cobb-Moore and her colleagues explore how children navigate, co-opt and define space through pretend play. The data and analysis is concerned with how children construct play as a negotiated, collaborate process, that attributing pretend properties to objects requires others to along with the propositions made, that is ‘a shared understanding of the pretence’ (p. 378). The extracts show how children appropriate and transform space in their pretend play, and manage the participation (or exclusion) of other children in these spaces.