ABSTRACT
Playworkers in the UK work with school-aged children to support their play. The practice is underpinned by a set of principles that establish playwork's professional and ethical framework. These principles create a number of contradictions for practice that have an ethical dimension. This chapter offers a modest exploration that seeks to reconfigure taken-for-granted assumptions that have become common-sense truths. It is modest in the sense that it marks an experimental and initial playing with ideas that are different for the author: philosophy as an activity in the midst of it. The chapter analyses the notion of the autonomous rational agent implicit in the Playwork Principles' understanding of both play and playwork so as to reconfigure playwork as relational, affective and affecting, embodied, situated and not reducible to representations in language. The chapter concludes with some tentative suggestions for what might be called dispositions for an ethics for playwork.
