Running bodies, raced landscapes
Trail running, self-tracking, and belonging in South African leisure spaces
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20457778 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Tanja Bosch (0000-0002-8093-1969, University of Cape Town, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Pages | 1-16 |
| Publication date | 2026-06-22 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Leisure Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0261-4367 • E-ISSN: 1466-4496 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/02614367.2026.2692686 |
| OpenAlex | W7165667404 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 25 |
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
Autoethnography · Colonialism · Embodied cognition · Politics · Recreation · Scholarship · Sociology of leisure · Adventure Sports and Sensation Seeking · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Recreation, Leisure, Wilderness Management
Assessing risk, automating racism
Consolidating Whiteness in Leisure Places
Digital Sociology
Data Epistemologies, The Coloniality of Power, and Resistance
To whom does this place belong? Whiteness and diversity in outdoor recreation and education
Sense of Inclusion and Race in a Public, Outdoor Recreation Setting
Policing the Race
Tracking oneself for others
Belonging and the politics of belonging
Ongoing Colonial Violence in Settler States
Black Faces, White Spaces
Identity, Politics, and the Beach
More than just fields
Working Out' Identity
From embodiment to emplacement
Black faces, black spaces
Legacies, Change and Transformation in the Post-Apartheid City
Doing Sensory Ethnography
Where Platform Capitalism and Racial Capitalism Meet
Rethinking Race, Calculation, Quantification, and Measure
The diverse domains of quantified selves
Social geographies of race
| Highly cited | No |
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