Thesis Supervisor: Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro

Thesis: Slides over the cabbages: Margins for action in playing together

July 2025

Abstract

Taking part in each other's imagination starts with a jump over a rope. This text is written from memories and research to explore play as a gesture toward transformation. Drawing on childhood experiences, the study examines how play operates through imagination as an embodied action, one that begins as a mental process but unfolds through engagement with physical spaces—a dynamic in which imagining and doing constantly inform one another. In the discussion of this process, the concept of attuned imagination is introduced as a pact of mutual coherence that enables shared meaning in imagining toguether.

Landing on the unstable grounds of neoliberalism, we meet the incapacity to imagine a horizon of meaning outside capitalism, as Mark Fisher described. Playing and imagining in attunement emerge as experimental practices with the capacity to create margins in which alternative possibilities can be creatively rehearsed and explored, generating small but meaningful disruptions within dominant structures.

Grounded in political, historical, and critical thought, the study concludes with a reflection on a community of neighbors in the rural interior of Portugal, whose gardens are spaces full of excuses to meet, relate, and play. The research reveals that even when imagination fosters gestures toward alternative social and ecological relations, such practices might remain entangled with repressive ideologies. Rather than offering resolutions, the study lingers in these tensions, highlighting play’s capacity to open margins for political imagination and embodied critique.

Author: Helena Estrela