This study explores how children navigate institutional regulation at an asylum centre and how their political acts of resistance are expressed through their struggle to access play. It shows that the children used tactical awareness to identify the displayed strategies of the institutional regulation, which was conditional for their development of tactical acts, through which they handled that regulation. The children’s political acts of resistance and struggle for play, which were hidden to the institution, demonstrated how they claimed their right to play, although this right was still structurally denied. Consequently, their politics is a politics of impediment.
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