Running With Zombies: Capturing New Worlds Through Movement and Visibility Practices With Zombies, Run!

This is a study on the aesthetics and embodied spatial experiences of running. Investigated here are questions on how bodies navigate local terrain through the practice of running, and how running bodies are made visible as networked and gendered agents moving in their public space. It is a qualitative study of networked movement, a feel of running, where the footwork of women in particular is located. To consider such textures of movement, this research works from a phenomenologically inspired sociology of running with a specific playful app in hand, Zombies, Run! This work suggests how playfulness tied to the very basic action of forward movement can cultivate new understandings of being in the world through other kinds of running body practices, prompting new attentions to movement, public space, and one’s position and mobility within it as a gendered body on the run