ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates how playing with participants, data and representation creates opportunities for humane, profound and pragmatic research processes. It discusses the several ways in which qualitative researchers may embrace consciously a variety of playful elements in research processes, including passion and pleasure, deep attention, creativity, performance and multiplicity. We work hard to earn the right to call ourselves researchers, and among the hard workers who strive to justify daily their place in the academy are feminists who want to be taken seriously as both cultural critics and knowledge producers. Serious play includes free movement plus the element of critical reflection. Tremendous creative energies emerge when we embrace learning new methodological skills not for the sake of mere novelty but as an opening to possibilities, an openness that we cannot sustain if we are too serious and not interested in play and adventure.
