The concept of 'play' is notoriously ambiguous, but we do know that when children engage in make-believe play the activity provides benefits for psychological development, holistic health, and building knowledge and relationships. This article discusses how a group of four-year-old children in New Zealand engage in pretend play by embodying the characters of mud-monsters and possums to avoid the rules around being respectful to their cultural heritage while playing in a protected bush reserve. The data were generated through a project investigating teaching and learning in everyday conversations between preschool teachers and children aged 2½-5 years old. Ten hours of video footage were gathered, of which one hour and forty minutes were in rural bushland. The analysis of the footage here uses an ethnomethodological framework, discussing the work of Sacks and Garfinkel to reveal the sequential organization of moral conduct in situ. The children's multimodal ways of embodying chosen destructive characters through predicated actions reveal how they attempt to evade negative consequences of breaking promises through pretend play. The article concludes with connections to moral philosophy, and by discussing how the turns of talk and gesture co-produce complex learning of culturally and morally appropriate behaviours in situ.

Purpose Recent developments in US rhetoric and policy advocating the militarisation and marketisation of outer space challenge the global commons values and regimes that developed partly in response to decolonisation. These regimes embodied aspirations to post-colonial distributive justice, as well as to international management for peaceful purposes. The purpose of this paper is to argue that global commons values should be defended against these challenges in order to avoid the risk of exporting colonial legacies of injustice into outer space. Design/methodology/approach This paper is an exercise in normative International Political Theory and so develops normative arguments by drawing on approaches in political theory and international law. Findings This paper demonstrates that the commons values endorsed in the aftermath of colonialism retain their relevance in a global politics that remains structured by post-colonial power relations. This paper also demonstrates that these commons values have evolved and found expression in central elements of international law, persisting as resources to be drawn on in normative argument. Originality/value This study places recent moves to assert US hegemony in space in the context of persistent post-colonial power relations and develops novel arguments in renewed support of commons values.

Over the past 10 years, the literature on the normative dimensions of partisanship and party politics has rapidly grown. Yet, however rich and diverse, this literature lacked so far a single text able to comprehensively map the contours of the existing debates and, at the same time, open up a range of future research avenues. Jonathan White and Lea Ypi’s The Meaning of Partisanship does an excellent job at fulfilling both tasks. First, it offers a wide-ranging and sustained engagement with key debates in the history of political thought, contemporary democratic theory and analytical political philosophy. Second, it opens up new areas of research ranging from partisanship across time to revolutionary and transnational partisanship. In this symposium, White and Ypi re-examine some of the book’s main themes by responding to the commentaries offered by six political theorists.

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