Educating beyond the emergency. A preliminary overview on the use of play in situations of crisis

If scientific literature (mainly psycho-pedagogical) on the child’s play is already immense and epistemologically recognized and internationally sanctioned by both the UN Declarations and Unicef, the same can not be said about the use of play in emergency situations (cultural humanitarian, social, political). We refer both to the war zones and refugee camps as well as natural disasters, as (unfortunately) the most recent history testifies to us. The present article, therefore, starting from the distinction between “play for the sake of play” and “play-like activities”, constitutes the outcome of a first attempt to gather in a coherent and critical corpus the researches on this topic, trying to highlight the heuristic and pedagogical value of the use of the play in situations of crisis.