MOBILISING RUNNING IN MOBILITIES RESEARCH: What are the ways in which running—the popular exercise, the locomotion, the etymology of the word and its rich idiomatic expressions—can be activated as a metaphor and method to think and talk about the so-called migrant crisis and, more generally, how people cross borders today? With phrases like “life on the run,” “letting your imagination run riot,” “running away,” and “running for your life,” how can the poetic processes of running act as a toolkit of resistance as we move about, to “run against” the status quo, in refusing to “take things lying down,” and letting things “come to a standstill”? What are the new frontiers for the twenty-first-century mobile citizen? What does it mean to be a political, digital, existential, and intellectual exile, either forced or voluntary? How can artists make and disseminate work on the move, and reflect on and complicate this life on the move? These are a few of overlapping—and contradictory—questions behind an exhibition of eight works published in the Winter 2016 edition of Transfers Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies. Transfers 6 (3): 130–37. Chief Editor: Gijs Mom, Eindhoven University of Technology Exhibition editor: Fernanda Duarte, North Carolina State University ISSN 2045-4813 (Print) ISSN 2045-4821 (Online). See other efforts in Mobilities Research, the restless body and mind and Running Studies.
Caption: Top: Certainly the Toughest Ultramarathon of Your Life (Kai Syng Tan 2015), featured in the gallery, which points to the hypocrises of white ultramarathoners by comparing their ‘struggle’ with the journeys undertaken by migrants. Above: Screenshot of first page of article (2016).