Hannah Borenstein

Hannah Borenstein is a 3rd year PhD student in the department of Cultural Anthropology. Her research is about the everyday lived and embodied experience of young women working in Ethiopia to gain a foothold in the global economy of running. Running economy – a multi-faceted physiological measure in sports science to determine how much energy an athlete uses to travel a certain distance at a certain speed – is used as a lens to explore how women value, and change the valuation of, their bodies, always linked to the political economy of the global athletics market. Histories of racist biologism in athletics and a growing interest in sports science within Ethiopia shape relationships that young female runners have with their bodies, which are also negotiated in relation to coaches, international agents, officials, and fans. Her project takes as its central concerns the frictions emerge as young athletes move – bodily, economically, spatially, temporally – that are premised on the idea of running toward something better.