23/06/2026
Running bodies, raced landscapes
How do racialised belonging and digital self-tracking shape experiences of outdoor leisure in post-apartheid South Africa? In her latest article, 'Running Bodies, Raced Landscapes: trail running, self-tracking, and belonging in South African leisure spaces', Prof Tanja Bosch of and autoethnographically explores mountain trails as a leisure space structured by race, gender, class, and colonial histories.
Full Abstract:
This article examines how racialised belonging and digital self-tracking shape experiences of outdoor leisure in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on a critical autoethnography of trail running at a South African mountain marathon, it argues that mountain trails are socially produced leisure spaces structured by race, gender, class, and colonial histories of land and access. Using Lefebvre’s theory of the production of space alongside scholarship on racial geographies, embodiment, and the politics of belonging, the article shows how GPS watches, tracking apps, and performance metrics mediate both physical effort and social visibility. While these technologies promise optimisation, motivation, and self-knowledge, they also intensify comparison, surveillance, and affective experiences of not belonging within historically white, elite outdoor recreation cultures. Through autoethnographic vignettes, the analysis demonstrates how trail running becomes a site where embodied movement, data practices, and spatial politics intersect, revealing how leisure practices reproduce and make visible broader inequalities. The article brings together critical leisure studies on race and outdoor recreation, scholarship on the quantified self, and post-apartheid spatial geography.
Read it here: https://doi.org/10.1080/02614367.2026.2692686
