Paper short abstract:

This paper explores running practices in the urban setting from a posthumanist point of view. The aim is to understand how bodies, cities and technologies are becoming constantly through movement. Mobile interviews (running and walking) are part of the ethnographic approach. Activist bodies emerge.

Paper long abstract:

Posthumanism poses an intellectual challenge when we try to link its theoretical postulates to everyday empirical realities. Interested in the potentia of bodies and the embodied processes of becoming, during 2016-2018 I carried out ethnographic fieldwork with urban runners in Barcelona, using combined mobile methodologies to explore how human and non-human bodies emerge constantly in its intra-action (Barad, 2007) of daily life practices. Departing from the analytical gaze of continuity 'continuum bodycity', I carried out in-motion interviews (running and walking) as part of the ethnographic work, to activate the analyses of the flows and continuities established in the relationships between different materialities. This also gave way to the analysis of the procedural character of digital technologies during the practice of running in everyday life. The senses and perceptions were key elements to rethink the body beyond the limits of the skin; also the use and mediation of digital technologies was an element that showed how bodies are reconfigured from control and systematization practices (self-tracking) or the connection they establish with the urban space from the extension/decrease of the capacities of the bodies linked to the elements of the environment (climate, urban textures, objects). These discoveries lead us to consider the body in movement as a methodological tool that adheres relational and activist dimensions to the study of corporality within feminist epistemological approaches.