Child’s Play

'In her groundbreaking account of how children are managed 'from above' even as their forms of play elude capitalism’s grip, Susan Ferguson will change your thinking about childhood and the unruly power of play. A must read!'

-- Rosemary Hennessy, author of In the Company of Radical Women Writers

'This book screams from the rooftops: ‘Let’s take the world apart and build it anew!’. Placing play and childhood centrally within questions about how we live, imagine, and struggle for worlds without capitalism, Ferguson’s book offers both analytic rigor and ludic inspiration'

-- Rachel Rosen, Director, Critical Childhood Studies Centre, UCL

'An intriguing argument for the political possibilities of children’s (and others’) life-making through play, and a hard look at the efforts of capitalism to channel and thwart its temporal and sensual pleasures to undermine its imaginative promises for radical change'

-- Cindi Katz, author of Growing Up Global: Economic Restructuring and Children's Everyday Lives

'What a novel and intriguing idea: to look at play and childhood from a Marxist feminist point of view! With an open heartedness and an analytical mind, Susan Ferguson explores how childhood collides with capitalism. Yet how we might recapture the central aspect of play in creating a better world. One of the pleasures of this very rewarding book was the introduction to a literature with which I was unacquainted. I learned a lot'

-- Nancy Holmstrom, Professor of Philosophy Emerita, Rutgers Univer