Research as Play
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This essay explores how a womanist theology of play can reimagine librarianship as a sacred, generative, and embodied practice. Drawing from personal experiences in librarianship and divinity school, it challenges dominant epistemologies that frame research as rigid and exclusionary, inviting instead curiosity, joy, and expanded ideas of meaning-making. Womanist thought, rooted in the lived experiences of Black women, reveals how systems of knowledge often privilege objectivity over imagination and marginalize relational, intuitive, and spiritual ways of knowing. The author engages scholars like Lakisha R. Lockhart Rush to argue for research as play—defined by attraction, improvisation, and freedom—as a liberative act. By embracing playful, interdisciplinary methods, libraries can become spaces of moral formation and intellectual vitality that invite exploration, risk, and wholeness. This vision affirms the power of play to challenge the limits of academic structure and create conditions for wonder and renewal.
DOI: 10.31046/0s58ac51
Author: Niambi McLaurin
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7102410539
FWCI:
Cites:
Cited by:
Related to: