Last week, a paper I wrote with Jon Shaw and Paul Simpson (both at Plymouth) was published online by the journal Mobilities. The paper is titled Jography: Exploring Meanings, Experiences and Spatialities of Recreational Road-running and is a heavily revised version of my undergraduate dissertation. So it feels like a long time coming but I now have my first published paper! Yay!
It won’t be given an issue number or published in any hard copies of the journal for a while but you can still access the paper on the website. The below link should give free access to the first 50 people for those of you without institutional access: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SK6YkcB72qzSTZXyxiXm/full. I will pop a preprint version of the paper on here as well shortly.
Here is the abstract for the paper:
Jogging is a relatively under-researched mobile practice with much existing literature focusing on ‘serious’ and competitive running. In this paper, we provide an account of some of the movements, meanings and experiences that together help produce the practice of jogging in the south-western English city of Plymouth. Drawing upon participant diaries and interviews, we uncover rich detail about how joggers ascribe not one but a number of meanings to their practice. Some of these are positive, some are negative; some complement each other and some compete with each other. We also consider how the experiences of joggers can be shaped by their ongoing need to develop tactics capable of enabling them to negotiate space with non-joggers. This is in some contrast to more competitive running that occurs in the separated space of an athletics track. Our sense is that better awareness of the meanings and experiences of jogging will be of value if the advertised health and sustainability benefits of the practice are to be more effectively encouraged and promoted.
This work forms the foundation of much of current work into running so I look forward to advancing some of its arguments in the future. For now though, enjoy.
Jographies 