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201825 https://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.2.N.201825 http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ All Rights Reserved 2025 358 pages Doctoral Dissertation Academic theses en Singha, Shagun Gee, Elisabeth Coats, Cala Carlson, David Arizona State University Partial requirement for: Ph.D., Arizona State University, 2025 Field of study: Educational Technology This dissertation explores play through posthumanist and new materialist theoretical frameworks, using the outdoor Global Positioning System-based game of GeoCaching. The GeoCaches used for the study are situated in urban outdoor spaces to encourage material interactions among human participants, non-human living entities, and material landscapes. This approach specifically explores adult play to foster connections between human and more-than-human worlds. Grounded in the scholarly field of play, the study challenges anthropocentric assumptions by exploring how playful, embodied engagements with local ecologies generate new forms of relationality and learning.A posthumanist research design was implemented, primarily utilizing video recordings from wearable GoPro technology. Additional methods-including participant observation, photographs, audio recordings, and three types of interviews (walking, debrief, and semi-structured)-further enriched the documentation of multisensory and emergent play. Data were collected from two adult participants as they engaged in geocaching across a total of seven cache sites. Three analytical concepts-proximity, stickiness, and camouflage-emerged from the analysis, highlighting how material play is co-constituted through human and more-than-human intra-actions. Proximity foregrounds the ethical pulls between bodies and materials, framing play as a relational negotiation rather than a linear pursuit of goals. Stickiness draws attention to the affective and material bonds that linger, positioning play as a process of entanglement and interdependency, where traces persist beyond the game. Camouflage is understood as a more-than-visual correspondence with material, highlighting how attunement to subtle environmental cues fosters deeper, reciprocal relationships with the more-than-human world. Findings demonstrate that play provides opportunities for heightened awareness and material sensitivity, as participants may become attuned to the agency of objects, landscapes, and more-than-human bodies. Concept creation served as a dynamic sense-making tool, tracing complex, emergent relationships within human and more-than-human assemblages. The GeoCaching app functioned as both a navigational tool and provocateur, prompting tactile engagement with landscapes and positioning play as a dialogue between technology, bodies, and materials. By foregrounding material agency, this research contributes to scholarship advocating for less binary approaches between play and learning, while also reflecting critically on the study’s methodological limitations, unexpected challenges, and the researcher’s own positionality. Education Educational technology Games Geocaching New-Materialism Play Posthumanism wearable technology Material Play: Rethinking Human and More-Than-Human Connections through GeoCaching