Catalina Pollak Williamson defends doctoral thesis on ‘Radical Play’

Catalina Pollak Williamson’s doctoral research introduces Radical Play as a conceptual and methodological framework for rethinking urban transformation. Challenging the instrumentalisation of play in mainstream participatory processes and placemaking strategies, she argues that play’s liminal and subversive nature — operating beyond the bounds of structural normativity — opens up a space of radical possibility. 

Through this lens, play is understood as a political and epistemic practice: a situated, relational, embodied and affective mode of knowing through which alternative social relationships, political identities, and collective urban imaginaries can emerge and take form. 

In response to deepening urban inequalities and the erosion of collective life under neoliberal urbanism, this research offers a critical perspective for problematising urban struggles and interrogating the spatialised dynamics of power that shape everyday life. 

Through layered autoethnography, Catalina analyses a series of participatory interventions she co-developed in Latin America and Europe, exploring how Radical Play can challenge hegemonic ideologies, build collective capacity, and reclaim urban space from below as a site of commoning and mutual care. These interventions serve both as fields of empirical inquiry and as methodological experiments through which the potentials and limitations of Radical Play are critically explored. 

Ultimately, the thesis contributes to radical urban scholarship, participatory design, and critical pedagogies by proposing Radical Play as a tactical and pedagogical dispositif for reimagining the city otherwise. It offers both theoretical insight and grounded methodology for those seeking to mobilise play as a transformative force within broader struggles for spatial justice and urban democracy.

Image credit: Catalina Pollak Williamson, 'Melodias'