Educational discourses on digital play

This article investigates educational discourses on children’s play with digital technologies, based on the analysis of dissertations and theses produced in Graduate Programs in Education. Grounded in Michel Foucault’s theoretical contributions, the study highlights how digital play practices are articulated with disciplinary mechanisms, not to abolish the subject, but to reconfigure it into new forms of docility. These practices combine surveillance and control with discourses of freedom and autonomy, creating an ambivalence in which children’s cooperation occurs through voluntary submission, thereby reinforcing disciplinary power under the appearance of autonomy. In late modernity, control ceases to be rigid and begins to operate in subtle and adaptable ways, using the idea of freedom as a strategy of governance. In this context, digital play becomes a central space for understanding how education shapes subjects that self-regulate and adjust to the social and technological demands of the twenty-first century. https://doi.org/10.21723/riaee.v20i00.1955202

Ambivalence · Autonomy · Discipline · Social control · Child Development and Digital Technology · Literacy, Media, and Education · Psychodrama and Leishmaniasis Studies