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There are few scholarly books about toys, and even fewer that consider toys within the context of culture and communication. Toys and Communication is an innovative collection that effectively showcases work by specialists who have sought to examine toys throughout history and in many cultures, including 1930's Europe, Morocco, India, Spanish art of the 16th-19th centuries. Psychologists stress the importance of the role of toys and play in children's language development and intellectual skills, and this book demonstrates the recurrent theme of the transmission of cultural norms through the portrayal, presentation and use of toys. The text establishes the role of toy and play park design in eliciting particular forms of play, as well as stressing the child's use of toys to 'become' more adult. It will be beneficial for courses in education, developmental psychology, communications, media studies, and toy design.
List of contents
1. Toys and communication: An introduction; Jeffrey Goldstein and Luisa Magalhães.- 2. The end of play and the fate of digital play media: A historical perspective on the marketing of play culture; Stephen Kline.- 3. Toys: Between rhetoric of education and rhetoric of fun; Gilles Brougère.- 4. A toy semiotic, revisited; David Myers.- 5. Age differences in the use of toys as communication tools; Amanda Gummer.- 6. LMNOBeasts: Using typographically inspired toys to aid development of language and communication skills in early childhood; Todd Maggio, Kerri Phillips, Christina Madix.- 7. Images of toys in Spanish painting (16th-19th centuries): Iconographic Languages; Oriol Vaz and Michel Manson.- 8. Communication in Moroccan Children's Toys and Play; Jean-Pierre Rossie.- 9. Dincs as Worldviews: Things that Communicate a Mind; Koumudi Patil.- 10. Holocaust war games: Playing with genocide; Suzanne Seriff.- 11. Working class children's toys in times of war and famine. Play, work and the agency of children in Piraeus neighborhoods during the German Occupation of Greece; Cleo Gougoulis.- 12. Can toy premiums induce healthy eating?; Carla Ferreira and Luísa Agante.- 13. You Are What You Eat: Toying with the Process of Becoming; Mariah Wade.- 14. Work and play in a theme park; Luísa Magalhães.- 15. Design for rebellious play; Lieselotte van Leeuwen and Mathieu Gielen.- 16. Hong Kong PolyPlay: An Innovation Lab for Design, Play, and Education;Rémi Leclerc.-
About the author
Luísa Magalhães is Researcher in Communication Sciences at the Catholic University of Portugal, and is especially interested in the relationship between children, toys and play activities.
Jeffrey Goldstein is Affiliated Researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. He is the author or editor of 16 books and is a fellow of both the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.
Summary
There are few scholarly books about toys, and even fewer that consider toys within the context of culture and communication. Toys and Communication is an innovative collection that effectively showcases work by specialists who have sought to examine toys throughout history and in many cultures, including 1930’s Europe, Morocco, India, Spanish art of the 16th-19th centuries. Psychologists stress the importance of the role of toys and play in children’s language development and intellectual skills, and this book demonstrates the recurrent theme of the transmission of cultural norms through the portrayal, presentation and use of toys. The text establishes the role of toy and play park design in eliciting particular forms of play, as well as stressing the child’s use of toys to ‘become’ more adult. It will be beneficial for courses in education, developmental psychology, communications, media studies, and toy design.
