Language, Identity Online and Running

“This is a beautifully written book presenting intertwined studies on digital identities among runners. It combines fine-grained research and personal insight to reveal how running identity is communicated in these vibrant online communities. While these revelations are addressed to those interested in understanding identity in digital contexts, I wouldn’t be surprised if some readers felt like lacing up a pair of running shoes and joining them, after reading this book.”
-Patrick Kiernan, Meiji University, Japan
This book focuses on language and identity online within the context of running from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brings together digital ethnography, existential phenomenology, interpretative phenomenological analysis and sporting embodiment in the pursuit to explore runners’ lived experiences andidentities online. Language, identity and identity online are often studied in broader social contexts such as education, culture and politics, and running is intimately related to key issues in contemporary society, such as health and exercise, sport and nationalism, embracing a variety of discourse types and having implications more generally for our identity as human beings. The evolving online media through which people make sense of who they are and which groups they belong to are enabling new ways of realising identities and relationships. This book will be of interest to applied linguists, discourse analysts, as well as those interested in sports, sports psychology, and identity enactment. 


Nur Kurtoğlu-Hooton is Lecturer in English Language at Aston University, UK. She has experience of working on a range of teacher education research projects in the fields of teacher development and technology in teaching and learning, with language teachers in the UK and overseas. She has previously published one of her teacher education projects into post-observation feedback under the title Confirmatory Feedback in Teacher Education: An Instigator of Student Teacher Learning  (2016, Palgrave Macmillan). Her research interests include teacher development, technology in teaching and learning, and social media research, particularly in the sport of running