About

The idea

Inspiring people (prisoners and not-prisoners) through marathon running and the Feldenkrais method®  is the core idea of a project of pedagogy of resilience where education is not teaching (educare) but leading out into the open (educere). In proposing a different idea of education (educere – leading out) in prison setting and beyond, Runforever is a project contrasting mainstream rehabilitation programs by offering a new way to engage with prisoners/people and humanise prison care/health care. This approach demands a radical reframing of what we mean by education and therefore the acceptance that it cannot be instrumentalised for achieving directly measurable results although it can have a fundamental impact on people, leading to improving their resilience, confidence and sense of self (individual and social). Therefore the project aims at distinguishing itself from the logics of goal-oriented rehabilitative programmes, towards a practice of freedom and equality.

How we work

Runforever believes that “people are not crimes” and that we need to change the conversation around incarceration and rehabilitation by rethinking education and health.

Our work is particularly important now after covid which has exacerbated the time that prisoners spend in their cells and magnified their sense of isolation and loss of freedom. Both running and Feldenkrais are recognised as invaluable practices of care of the self by combining the individual with the collective: people have the opportunity of being outdoor with others, improve posture, balance, coordination and the capacity of listening to the body in a group environment. They are empowered on paths of awareness, attention and listening, enabling them to develop improved health, self-care, self-management and health life choices.

Runforever doesn’t deliver teaching sessions in a face-to-face setting. Rather than confronting each other, we “run” in the same direction. We understand health as relational and therefore work to remove isolation offering courses or programmes which cannot be conceived just as adding new skills in a block of classes fashion or exercises to do alone in the cells but addressing the existential in a collective endeavour. By acknowledging that any form of evaluation can affect the sense of safety and undermine the learning context (Stephen Porges 2021), we aim at co-creating new forms of value from the inside by moving from data gathering to storytelling. Inspired by the notion of warm data by Nora Bateson, Runningsories and Photovoice give voice to prisoners and include them in creating the path of learning and healing of our programmes.  

Our work is contributing to shape a new understanding of health within prison environment in dialogue with HMPG Recovery, Health & Well-Being Strategy Group which takes into consideration the role and impact of social inequalities and adverse childhood experiences upon mental health.

Urgency

Reoffending and rehabilitation in prison environment

Prisoners are often ill-prepared for release at the end of their sentence, and a return to society can be experienced as very difficult. Reoffending rates for those released from prison remain stubbornly high. The experience of imprisonment often co-exists amongst factors such as educational disadvantage, health inequality, unem­ployment, addiction, family breakdown, and poverty. The notion of rehabilitation is presently much contested and ambiguous. Some social research (Maruna 2012) points out that prisoner reintegration as it is currently practiced especially through contemporary rehabilitative programs, is a failing ritual reinforcing pre-ex­isting disadvantages (eg. educational) and inequalities (eg. health).

We need a new idea of education and health

Runforever is an educational project, where education is not teaching but leading out into the open. In fact it brings attention to a different idea of education in the sense of educere-leading out (Ingold 2018, Masschelein 2010). This is different from more traditional understanding of education as educare – transmitting knowledge. In fact educere fosters existential transformation. This project will be an example of this approach. It will address the question: what does education mean in the prison setting? And more generally: what do we mean by education? Many diverse forms of adult education are currently offered as rehabilitative practices within prisons around the world. The rehabilitative perspective assumes that prisoners, like pre-school children, are not yet fully formed human beings and therefore in need of some form of knowledge. These programmes follow the discredited medical model of imprisonment which views the prisoner primarily as something broken in need of fixing or as an object in need of treatment. Reframing education as treatment reduces the individual to a patient, a subject, somebody that something is done to, rather than with. Therefore some of these programmes, have been criticised as attempts by the state to “responsibilize,” “redeem,” or “normalise” the socially excluded.

What do “reoffending” and “rehabilitation” mean in the context of health and education? Prisoners are often framed as patients or school children by rehabilitative programs and pressed by expectations of recovery or of learning achievements or skills. What the educational experience of the wall of the marathon which fosters the capacity of running forever and abandoning the need of reaching the finish line, inspire to prison education, health and wellbeing?  These initial ideas will enable tracing an interdisciplinary and more-than-academic path at the intersection between prison environment, education and health highlighting values of social and cultural difference within the background of systemic transformation.

Covid and contemporary social context

Covid has exacerbated the time that prisoners spent in their cells and magnified their sense of loss of freedom.  Other than metaphorical, the sense of grief and loss has also been a real one for many people in the prison and more generally for the all community due to covid.

Horizon

Runforever proposes small actions participating to wider systemic change. Its commitments are counter cultural:

  • humanize healthcare beyond the paradigm of the clinical gaze and addressing the existential (Hannah, 2014)
  • promote a new understanding of education as leading out (rather than teaching)
  • resists conventional forms of evaluation by co-creating value from the inside
  • learning to run forever: the commitment is for a shift of values countering the dominant logic of the winner
  • foster a future society based on difference and variation

Path

Our path follows two simultaneous and complementary strands:

Delivering projects as  “beautiful actions”

According to eco-philosopher Arne Naess (1993) to act beautifully means not starting from an external moral duty but rather following one’s own inclination which should already be laden with ethical value towards the world and the environment of which we are part. These actions should leave inspiration. Runforever promotes experimental projects intended as creative and artistic forms of inquiry between art, anthropology and education, based on the combination of autobiography with marathon running and the Feldenkrais method fostering processes of self-discovery through movement. It focuses on the notion of limit as wall, highlighted in the experience of the wall of the marathoner, for exploring its potential in terms of personal transformation and for opening other ways of being in the world.

Nurturing the ground for systemic change

It is important to work on the margin of mainstream values and institutionalized procedures. We need to bring awareness to the process and monitor it throughout its development. We will: