Philosophers, cognitive-, and educational psychologists have contended that reliable approaches to achieving epistemic aims are dependent upon attitudes such as curiosity and open-mindedness (Barzilai & Chinn, 2018, 2024; Chinn et al., 2011; Sosa, 2015; Zagzebski, 1996). Furthermore, critical thinking, an inherent necessity when engaging with research, has also been conceptualised as dependent upon such cognitive and emotional abilities, allowing researchers to hold their prior beliefs in suspension while engaging with new ideas and approaches (Best, 2021; Deegan, 2024; Greene & Yu, 2016). Thus, curiosity, critical thinking and creativity are arguably three fundamental elements that are involved along the research process and therefore have a direct impact on how we structure and undertake research projects. Engaging in research as the production of knowing and thinking contributes to the transformation of education.

While academic life is at risk of becoming a careful curation of productivity as a sign of academic prestige and self-presentation (Blackmore, 2015; Macfarlane, 2020), the imperative to ‘publish or perish’ is both a major point of distress for academics (Aprile et al., 2021) and leads research to become an alienated and alienating activity (Watermeyer et al., 2022). It is not just academic wellbeing that has been affected by this, but arguably research itself has been put in jeopardy by diverting the focus from the substantial epistemological contributions towards the production of quantifiable outputs under the neoliberal agenda (see Macfarlane, 2021) thus reducing spaces to engage in creative thinking. Facing the transitional uncertainty needed in opening new and unknown possibilities may be too much of a challenge both emotionally and cognitively (Sánchez & Sebastián, 2024). 

We see that Early Career Academics (ECAs) are particularly vulnerable to such as curation of productivity, as learning the rules of the ‘academic game’ in terms of teaching, research and service is a central issue when entering the field (McKay & Monk, 2017). The push to perform accordingly has brought about interesting challenges when thinking about ECAs’ work, considering the increasing need to follow the rules of the game (Castelló et al., 2020; Djerasimovic, 2021; Djerasimovic & Villani, 2020). Our workshop actively seeks to create a space for researchers to forget the pressures brought by issues such as ‘publish or perish’ and instead to fully engage with their creative selves through curiosity and play. 

Drawing on a multimodal approach to learning, we see games as a way to engage in unconventional safe-spaces for transformation (Laloux, 2016; Alatorre Guzmán, 2023; Sebastián et al., 2025; Skovbjerg et al., 2024). While extending education beyond curricula and the school borders (Coburn & Penuel 2016), playing facilitates participatory practices and fosters trans-epistemic design approaches (Keller & Weber, 2020). This way, the aim of our workshop is to enable a playful space where people are free from dealing with the ‘real life consequences of change’ (as in Sebastián et al., 2025). By allowing for the exploration of alternatives to their “real” research setting, we propose to play a game of our own collective design to critically reflect on our personal and professional motivations to research, and to curiously engage in new, fresh and creative perspectives to bring into our work.

We invite our fellow scholars to play one game intended to challenge our established and ongoing academic work, while curiously and critically exploring alternatives to our often implicit ontological and epistemological understandings that underlie our approaches to conducting science (O'Doherty et al., 2024). We contend that by engaging with such a stance to our collective work framed as a game, we may joyously and freely strengthen the frameworks of (trans-)epistemological justification that underlie our approach to research, in line with methodological calls for such frameworks to be made explicit (Carter & Little, 2007; Qvortrup & Lykkegaard, 2024). To do this, our game is centred around the aspect of our work that brings us all together: we have questions we want to answer. Thus, the starting point of this proposal is to collectively raise questions regarding the central axis of our academic work. Participants begin by breaking down their research project and gaining new perspectives. The workshop will have four phases. Initially, the participants will describe their research question in relation to the following elements: study field, subtopic, context, population, expected outcome, method, and analysis tool. In a second phase, participants will challenge each other through exchanging and comparing specific elements of their research design. In order to provoke and foster further conversations, we will circulate wild cards with uncommon elements, aiming to spark curiosity, but also to gain the benefits from a more speculative engagement with one’s research. The objective of phase three is to elaborate a postcard to share the fictitious research question with one real person, preferably one familiar child or close friend. After this, the workshop will move to a closing open-discussion moment to go over both the content and the form of the game. Not only will we discuss what happened, how their research was challenged and changed, but we will explore how the game itself fostered their creativity, curiosity and critical thinking. Number of players: 5 to 20 Time: 120 minutes Requirements: cardboard cards (postcards) and colour pens or pencils, Space: a room with chairs and tables to write, placed in a circle. space to walk around.

Participating in this workshop will allow researchers to reconnect to the three c’s in a democratic and playful manner, which is both needed and potentially transformative. This type of charting alternatives to our “real life” allows us to rethink assumptions within our work through exploring alternative and potential research elements, structures and configurations, and thus reclaiming our own academic identity work which has been arguably alienated under our current neoliberal working conditions. Here, playing is an invitation to experience a second order of consequences that can only happen when people engage in open ended activities, when everyone is having fun, keen for adventures and prone to collaborate. With this workshop we expect to generate a safe space for participants to explore the emergent properties of play, learning what each needs at their own rhythm (Farne, 2014). Moreover, we expect to continue developing our model, potentially as a virtual tool to remind participants that research can be fun.

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