During two semesters at Berkeley in the outgoing phase, I have received ongoing training through seminars, workshops, reading groups, courses (such as Wittgenstein and Anthropology, Religion and Anthropology), and one-on-one learning from Berkeley's experts in Anthropology. Existing data on Muslim Runners has been analyzed and new data on running activists has been gathered and partially analyzed. I anticipated to conduct three days a week of fieldwork in months 6 to 9 I to conduct interviews with 20 activists and protagonists in the diversity in outdoor/running movement in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley, San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose). I have achieved this goal and feel I have a good grip on how social running clubs in SF Bay Area are constituted and what we can learn from them. What is more, I also joined a one particular running club and conducted fieldwork with them, 2 days a week for 7 months. I immediately applied skills acquired at Berkeley to analyse already gathered empirical data and develop novel theoretical and methodological framework on the sensorial embodiment of racialization and disseminate results to academic audiences. I gave a research seminar at UC Berkeley’s Anthropology department on 14 April 2023, and I delivered three instead of two conference presentations.
In the return phase at Leiden University, I focused on further analyzing the collected data and writing up the research. This has resulted in presentations at multiple disciplinary and interdisciplinary conferences, but also invited lectures and interviews. I have developed a theoretical framework on the sensorial embodiment of racialization, and together with a group of international colleagues further developed the concept of sensory ecologies