The uses of running: Urban homelessness, creative initiatives, and "recovery" in the neoliberal city

Across North American cities, emerging forms of urban governance from the 1970s produced forms of racialized, visualized, and spatialized urban poverty. Attempts to revitalize, recast, and spectacularize the urban environment left cities with vexing questions about what should be done with homeless people and also what homeless people should be doing. Amidst the rolling back of State social welfare policies and provision (), creative, informal, communal, or non-governmental initiatives have emerged in response to urban poverty and homelessness. One such organization is Back on My Feet, a national, not-for-profit organization that partners with homeless and addiction recovery facilities, which strives to utilize running as a means of empowerment. This ethnographic inquiry speaks to the ways in which the social practice of running amongst those housed in a temporary recovery facility is imbricated with their lifestyles and identities, an urban context, and homeless discourses and stigmas. It is illustrative of how the rhetoric of “recovery” yokes together the entrepreneurial ethos of neoliberalism with the management of homeless people.<br/

Toward a "Pedagogy of Reinvention": Memory Work, Collective Biography, Self-Study, and Family

In this article, we illustrate how we have drawn on the methodology of collective biography as a way to inform our teaching practices. Collective biography offers a strategy for retrieving and reworking memories/experiences that can be used to understand subjectivity. In doing so, we utilize this work on our memories, experiences, and subjectivities as we engage in the self-study of education practice. Seeking to incorporate embodied, familial, emotional, temporal, contextual, and cognitive interpretations of past and present, we aim to make our pasts useable for our futures. We discuss the ways in which memory, experience, and reinterpretations of both as interplays among past, present, and context contribute to our reinvention of teaching practices. </jats:p

Governing Homelessness Through Running

In the context of social welfare austerity and non-state actors’ interventions into social life, an urban not-for-profit organization in the United States, Back on My Feet, uses the practice of running to engage those recovering from homelessness. Promoting messages of self-sufficiency, the organization centralizes the body as a site of investment and transformation. Doing so calls to the fore the social construction of ‘the homeless body’ and ‘the running body’. Within this ethnographic inquiry, participants in recovery who ran with the organization constructed moralized senses of self in relation to volunteers, organizers, and those who do not run, while in recovery. Their experiences compel consideration of how bodily constructions and practices reproduce morally underpinned, self-oriented associations with homeless and neoliberal discourses that obfuscate systemic causes of homelessness, pose challenges for well-intentioned voluntary or development organizations, and service the relief of the state from social responsibility

Running with neoliberalism: The practice and politics of voluntarism, homelessness, and sweat in urban Baltimore

Shimmering as a spatial and temporal beacon of private capital investment, Baltimore is built testament to a three-decade transformation wrought upon much of United States. Within this time, Baltimore's city government has been refashioned and repurposed, from primarily focusing on managing the welfare of its citizenry, to becoming preoccupied with the entrepreneurial restructuring of the city as a motor of private capital accumulation (Harvey, 2001; Silk & Andrews, 2006). The pervasive spread of such reformation relied largely upon the uncritical adoption of neoliberal techniques of governance (Rose, 2001; Ong, 2006), and resulted in virtually uncontested elimination of many public services and agencies, and the increased responsibilitization of individuals and communities for social welfare. Philanthropic and voluntarist contributions of private citizens and organizations have come to address some, though certainly not all, of the shortfall in social welfare provision: This has been but one response to the palpable crises resultant of the continual shift to urban neoliberalism. Illustratively, Baltimore's sizeable homeless population becomes evermore dependent on the benevolence of private corporate social responsibility-directed capital and voluntarist physical labor. Through an empirically- anchored explication, this paper moves with the bodies of one private and voluntarist initiative: the Baltimore chapter of Back On My Feet. Back On My Feet is a non- profit organization that "promotes the self-sufficiency of homeless population by engaging them in running as a means to build confidence, strength and self-esteem" (2010). Within this study, Baltimore's Back On My Feet population is engaged through ethnographically-based inquiry, in order to excavate how the bodies of volunteers and those recovering from addiction or homelessness are mobilized as meaningful and viable apparatuses of neoliberal governance. Understanding Back On My Feet and its participants as constituent and contextual elements, this interpretive analysis suggests: how within a neoliberal conjuncture this form of movement subjectifies particular bodies in service of dominant power relations; and how this movement also shapes bodies in tangential or lateral movements possessive of the potential for negotiating dominant power relations

Athletes as community; athletes in community: covid-19, sporting mega- events and athlete health protection

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from BMJ Publishing Group via the DOI in this recor