Tan, K., 2015.

Running (in) the City

Tan was Invited Speaker to speak at University of Helsinki. Her host was Sirpa Tani, Professor of Geography and Environmental Education, and her audience were from pedagogy, geography and other disciplines.

This was a performance-lecture exploring running as a critical and creative urban technology, as well as how we talk about running. Using the non-linear presentation tool of Prezi, the talk draws on recent performance-lectures given at the American Geographers Meeting 2015 and the International Running Symposium, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Malmo, Sweden.

The performance also referenced the role of running in the thinking process (thinking in a 'running' way, by way of collaging different schools of thought together). The restless and agile presentation format was a self-reflexive evocation of running, and the difficulty, dizziness and delirium of running such a discourse. The playfulness was also a response to geographers' 'performance turn'.

Key was also a response to geographer Hayden Lorimers' defence of a particular modality of running that denied the inclusion of -- and indeed actively attacked -- other bodies, other minds and other voices, and which insists on privilege the highly-trained, privileged male and able/ ablelist body.