Photograph © Raymond Townsend
Childhoods and Play

Playing the Archive

The Opie Archive

Changing Play


Children's Playground Games and Songs in the New Media Age


Changing Play

A Study of the Relationship between Media, Commercial Markets and Children's Play in the UK between 1950 and 2011


Funded by the British Academy (2011–2012), this project explored the influence of media and the market on children's play. Jackie Marsh and Julia Bishop from the School of Education, University of Sheffield, analysed the responses to the Opie surveys submitted by children at two schools, in Sheffield and London. They also traced some of the original contributors and conducted oral history interviews with them, as well as others who attended the schools during the 1950s and 1960s. The project helped to pilot methods of tracing the original contributors to the Opie collection, including through the use of social networking sites.


Publications

Jackie Marsh. 2011. British Academy Project Final Report: A Study of the Relationship between Media, Commercial Markets and Children's Play in the UK between 1950 and 2011. View as PDF

Jackie Marsh and Julia C. Bishop. 2012 ‘“We’re playing Jeremy Kyle!”: Television Talk Shows in the Playground’. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 35.1, 16–30.

Jackie Marsh and Julia C. Bishop. 2012. ‘Rewind and Replay? Television and Play in the 1950s/ 1960s and 2010s’, International Journal of Play 1.3, 279–91.
 
Jackie Marsh and Julia Bishop. 2012. Changing Play: Play, Media and Commercial Culture from the 1950s to the Present Day (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2014) – Runner up, Katharine Briggs Folklore Award, 2014.

Jackie Marsh and Julia Bishop. 2014. ‘Challenges in the Use of Social Networking Sites to Trace Potential Research Participants’. International Journal of Research and Method in Education 37, 113–24.

Jackie Marsh. 2014. ‘From the wild frontier of Davy Crockett to the Wintery Fiords of Frozen: Changes in Media Consumption, Play and Literacy from the 1950s to the 2010s’. International Journal of Play 3.3, 267–79.