The popularity of distance running has increased dramatically since the 1960s and 1970s. Alongside that popularity has been an increased potential for inclusion, with one especially visible cohort being parents who run with their infants or young children in strollers. Focusing on the popular lifestyle magazine Runner's World over the 30-year period 1993-2022, this article seeks to understand the discursive construction of the stroller-pushing runner-mother. It argues that mothers who align with conventional conceptions of the 'good mother', managing their athletic engagement independently while parenting and making no demands on the running community, are valorized by the magazine. However, those who do make demands to inclusion in community events, such as in races or club meetups, are subject to more complex and often negative representations. This article highlights the limits of inclusivity in running communities and the importance of recognizing mothers as a unique cohort in sporting cultures.
This article analyzes the relationship between neoliberal aspirations for posthuman transcendence accomplished through an emergent technology of artificial intelligence computation, on the one hand, and modes of materialization - the historically and economically determined ways in which bodies are inscribed and rendered legible within normative frameworks of social intelligibility, on the other. I read N.K. Jemisin's novelette, Emergency Skin (2019) as delineating a dystopian future in which the epidermal dimension of race is reinstated as a eugenically informed politics of disenfranchisement based on a (re)conceptualization of skin as a prosthetically substitutable, artificially reproducible and differentially distributable commodity. A neoliberal vision of a postnational interplanetary future as dominated by AI, far from being a sanitized space of statistical objectivity from which the social parochialisms of class, race, and gender are eliminated, is in fact a hauntological structure delimited by the spectral matter of these. Drawing on insights from Critical Race Theory, I consider the role of literature, particularly science fiction, in articulating this spectral grammar of technological epidermalization. In Jemisin's speculative worldbuilding purist sciences aimed at colonizing the flesh as data are challenged by what Maurice Merleau-Ponty identifies as the vulnerable and impure chiasmatic topology of flesh.
As social media's prevalence in everyday life continues to grow, so too do concerns about how to facilitate digital wellbeing. In response to the recognized increase in digital harms, governments and researchers have deployed digital wellbeing as a mechanism to describe self-care practices. This has had the effect of representing the digital ecology as a setting of substantial risk. This article critiques some of the ways in which digital wellbeing is conceptualized across policy, scholarly and everyday discourse dimensions, and how the concept has been used to construct young people as vulnerable and 'at risk' in ways radically differentiated from adults. Drawing on interview data from Australian adults, we explore how users have offered more nuanced approaches to digital wellbeing. Nevertheless, these wellbeing strategies are inverted in ways which exclude young people from their adoption in favour of protectionist regulatory measures.
This article examines the disciplining of 'feminist excess' in public reception and Rosal & iacute;a's aesthetic repositioning in the context of the emergence of her album Lux (2025), situating her reluctance to explicitly identify as a feminist in a cultural scenario marked by the resurgence of religious youth movements, the advance of anti-feminist tendencies, and post-#MeToo disputes over the conditions of visibility and legitimacy of feminism. Based on a corpus of 40 journalistic pieces published in Spanish media, the article applies a model of critical discourse analysis based on the operationalization of the concept of excess in two analytical dimensions: as an epistemic device that organizes the politics of excess between discipline and resistance, and as a dynamic category linked to the redefinition of the thresholds of the intelligible. From this perspective, the article proposes to address containment not only as a technology of regulation, but as a space in which the limits of the intelligibility of feminist political activism and its discursive representation are renegotiated.
