Episode 9: Running, the Environment, and Human Becoming

In this episode Dr. Thomas F. Carter, Reader in Anthropology at the University of Brighton, speaks with your host, Sean Heath, about all things running.

Tom’s ethnographically focused anthropological research centres on the relationships between the individual and the state, the movement, migrations, and mobilities of various peoples, the politics of spectacle, and the dialectic relations of spatialized embodiment. He is currently working on a project centred around the human body, human movement, and how running makes us human.

Our conversation today centres on his book entitled On Running and Becoming Human: An Anthropological Perspective. We discuss the connections between our own moving bodies, our environments, and how the act of running literally shapes our minds, our bodies and the ways we experience our environments. Tom’s decades of running experience in both mundane and exotic places across the globe provides the route of travel as we wandered through the anthropological, neurological, philosophical and experiential aspects of our very human form of locomotion: running.

From the seemingly simple acts of running through neighbourhoods when we arrive in new cities to get an understanding of the layout of where we are, to the seeking out and exploration of spaces and places near and far from the places we live, Tom weaves together an intricate argument which positions the mind as an extension of the senses and the moving body out into the world. Our being through the act of running incorporates the environments we move through as environs, our individually positioned experiences of those environments informed by our societies, cultures, and physiology.

Dr. Thomas F. Carter has a forthcoming publication in forthcoming in The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, entitled "Gender and Sport" (2020). His latest book, On Running and Becoming Human: An Anthropological Perspective can be found through the link and is published by PalgraveMacMillan. His other research is accessible via his University of Brighton staff research profile page https://research.brighton.ac.uk/en/persons/thomas-carter