Taking a dialogic approach, this paper examines play from the point of view of the player's desire to act upon and through others. As an act-deed (postupok), play is considered as a way of relating to others as well as a means of co-creating and representing subjectivities. With Bakhtin's inspiration, play is seen as an act of agency and of becoming. It generates creative events taking place at the boundaries between several simultaneous intersecting worlds in play (‘chronotopes’). We look at how the play acts offer unique means of engaging with others that other social acts do not. Central to our view is the notion that play resides on the boundaries between imaginative and real worlds that exist on the outside of the performative realm, in private, dialogic spaces where ‘the footlights are off’. Here players are dialogically oriented to each other, rather than to an audience. As such the paper makes the claim that play, first and foremost, belongs to the players.

This article is concerned with developing a philosophical approach to a number of significant changes to academic publishing, and specifically the global journal knowledge system wrought by a range of new digital technologies that herald the third age of the journal as an electronic, interactive and mixed-media form of scientific communication. The paper emerges from an Editors' Collective, a small New Zealand-based organisation comprised of editors and reviewers of academic journals mostly in the fields of education and philosophy. The paper is the result of a collective writing process.

This exploratory study investigated the nature of teacher–infant social dialogue in a high-quality education and care centre in New Zealand. Employing dialogic methodology (Bakhtin, 1986), interactions between infants and teachers were analysed in terms of the language forms used in the social event. Polyphonic video footage of two infants’ social experiences and subsequent teacher interviews were coded to identify forms of language that occurred in dialogues and their interpreted pedagogical significance to teachers. The results revealed four central features of teacher–infant social exchange: (i) infants were more likely to respond to teachers interaction initiations when teachers used verbal and non-verbal language form combinations; (ii) when initiations were verbal and non-verbal combinations, both teachers’ and infants’ responses were significantly more likely to be also combinations of verbal and non-verbal language forms; (iii) both infants and teachers altered their responses to the language forms used by the initiator regardless of whether that was an infant or a teacher; and (iv) when teachers did not respond, they had a pedagogical rationale. Results highlight the multi-voiced and synchronous nature of teacher–infant interactions, the complex nature of communication in a formal out-of-home setting, and the pedagogical nature of teacher dialogue with infants