{"id":21881,"date":"2019-10-04T10:56:53","date_gmt":"2019-10-04T14:56:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=21881"},"modified":"2019-10-04T10:56:54","modified_gmt":"2019-10-04T14:56:54","slug":"event-the-role-of-play-in-human-evolution-and-public-life-work-or-play","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=21881","title":{"rendered":"Event: The Role of Play in Human Evolution and Public Life: Work, or Play?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Please join us for this month’s Ludics Seminar<\/a>\nat Harvard’s Mahindra Center to explore the role of play in human evolution and\npublic life. Details are below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter Gray, Boston College<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter Levine, Tufts University<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Role of Play in Human Evolution and Public Life: Work, or\nPlay?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Monday,\nOctober 28, 2019 – 6:00pm<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Location TBA<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PANEL SYNOPSIS<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nLudics Seminar, Mahindra Humanities Center, Harvard University<\/strong> will\nkick off its 2019-2020 series of talks with a panel discussion between\nProfessor Peter Gray, Boston College, and Professor Peter Levine, Tufts\nUniversity, on play and public life. Peter Gray will speak about his recent\nwork on play and egalitarianism in hunter and gatherer cultures. Peter Levine\nwill speak about Harry Boyte’s notion of public work, teasing out this binary\nbetween work and play in public life. If play is a corollary to egalitarianism\nas Peter Gray suggests, then why is the business of contributing to public life\nmost often associated with work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Role\nof Play in Human Evolution\u201d<\/em>
\nPeter\nGray, Boston College<\/strong>
\nHumans are the only primate (apparently) that can live peacefully, or at least\nrelatively so, in multi-male, multi-female social groups. From an evolutionary\npoint of view, how did we manage that? I will suggest here, based on research\namong contemporary band hunter-gatherers, that we did it at least in part by\nexpanding upon the general mammalian capacity for play and bringing it into\nadult social interactions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cCivic Engagement as Public Work, or Play?\u201d<\/em>
Peter Levine, Tufts University<\/strong>
Often, acts of civic engagement are defined as acts that people undertake voluntarily without being paid, such as voting, protest, or discussing issues. The very definition of \u201cvolunteer service\u201d is any work for other people that isn\u2019t remunerated. This distinction between work and citizenship goes back to Aristotle. Harry Boyte and other proponents of \u201cPublic Work\u201d have criticized it, arguing that it trivializes civic life by reducing it to after-work voluntarism and marginalizes the many ways that paid, employed people contribute to public spaces and institutions. The democracy of ancient Athens was not just a discussion among gentlemen; it was also a set of physical spaces–like the Pnyx, where discussions occurred–that people had built with their hands. However, we are not just public workers and artisans in the common world; we also like to play. We are homo ludens<\/em> as well as homo faber<\/em>. Designing civic engagement to be more play-like or game-like has been shown to make it more attractive and productive. So how should we think about the relationship between work and play in the civic domain? And what may happen to that relationship if work disappears for many human beings while opportunities for play expand?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BIOS
\nPeter\nGray<\/strong> is a research professor of psychology at Boston\nCollege who has conducted and published research in neuroendocrinology,\ndevelopmental psychology, anthropology, and education. He is author of an\ninternationally acclaimed introductory psychology textbook (Psychology<\/em>,\nWorth Publishers, now in its 8th edition, co-authored with David Bjorklund),\nwhich views all of psychology from an evolutionary perspective. His recent\nresearch focuses on the role of play in human evolution and how children\neducate themselves, through play and exploration, when they are free to do so.\nHe has expanded on these ideas in his book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the\nInstinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better\nStudents for Life<\/em> (Basic Books). He also authors a regular\nblog called Freedom to Learn<\/em>, for Psychology\nToday<\/em> magazine. He is a founding member and president of the\nnonprofit Alliance\nfor Self-Directed Education (ASDE)<\/em>, which is aimed at creating a\nworld in which children\u2019s natural ways of learning are facilitated rather than\nsuppressed. He is also a founding board director of the nonprofit Let\nGrow<\/em>, the mission of which is to renew children\u2019s freedom to play\nand explore outdoors, independently of adults. He earned his undergraduate\ndegree at Columbia College and Ph.D. in biological sciences at the Rockefeller\nUniversity many years ago. His own current play includes kayaking,\nlong-distance bicycling, backwoods skiing, and vegetable gardening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Peter\nLevine<\/strong> is the Academic Dean and Lincoln Filene Professor of\nCitizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University\u2019s Jonathan Tisch College\nof Civic Life. He has tenure in Tufts\u2019 Political Science Department, and he\nalso has secondary appointments in the Tufts Philosophy Department and the\nTufts Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute. He directs the Civic\nStudies Major at Tufts. Levine graduated from Yale in 1989 with a degree in\nphilosophy. He studied philosophy at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, receiving\nhis doctorate in 1992. From 1991 until 1993, he was a research associate at\nCommon Cause. From 1993-2008, he was a member of the Institute for Philosophy\n& Public Policy in the University of Maryland\u2019s School of Public Policy.\nDuring the late 1990s, he was also Deputy Director of the National Commission\non Civic Renewal. Levine was the founding deputy director (2001-6) and then the\nsecond director (2006-15) of Tisch College\u2019s CIRCLE, The Center for Information\nand Research on Civic Learning and Engagement.
\nLevine is the author of We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting\nFor: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America<\/em> (Oxford University\nPress, 2013), five other scholarly books on philosophy and politics, and a\nnovel. He has served on the boards or steering committees of AmericaSpeaks,\nStreet Law Inc., the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, the Campaign\nfor the Civic Mission of Schools, Discovering Justice, the Kettering\nFoundation, the American Bar Association\u2019s Committee for Public Education, the\nPaul J. Aicher Foundation, and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please join us for this month’s Ludics Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Center to explore the role of play in human evolution and public life. Details are below: Peter Gray, Boston College Peter Levine, Tufts University The Role of Play in Human Evolution and Public Life: Work, or Play? Monday, October 28, 2019 – 6:00pm Location […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21881"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21882,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21881\/revisions\/21882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}