To further explore Detroit’s role within a broader context, runner has prompted collaborations with people and communities throughout the Industrial Midwest whose practices have also been shaped by collapse and adaptation. Inspired by Franco Berardi's Post-Futurist Manifesto, our editorial approach is grounded in the belief that places typically marked as peripheral or “post-industrial” cultivate forms of experimentation and mutual reliance that would resonate far beyond their unique cultural ecosystems. Rather than searching for the future’s next “utopia,” we are interested in discovering ways that people build meaningful lives from the conditions that already exist around them...
Ashley Cook
May 27, 2026
literature, activism - detroit city, great lakes region
On Saturday, October 25, 2025, Runner Magazine presented a lecture by Walter Lucken IV followed by a Q & A moderated by Eleanor Aro and Emily Jones of Michigan Student Power Alliance. The talk took place in the Clara Stanton Jones Friends Auditorium at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library. The event addressed the concerns originally expressed by Lauren Berlant in the text ‘68 or Something. Walter Lucken, Eleanor Aro, Emily Jones, and audience members asked what we can learn by moving beyond the memory of 1968 and releasing our attachment to a triumphant past?..
Walter Lucken IV
October 27, 2025
literature, activism - detroit city
Float the Vote was one such point of curiosity that I felt could be fully realized and brought forth into the physical world because of a sincere focus on strengthening access to voting in communities around Detroit. I was ecstatic to discover I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Feeling calm, ready, and vigilant, our five-person team set out into the sprawling urban landscape of Detroit to recruit food trucks and reach as many people as possible...
Brandon Stuart
February 15, 2021
activism, culture - detroit city
On July 31st of this year, the Twitter account belonging to Wayne State University’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors tweeted that "lowering Black student enrollment by 40% is nothing to celebrate!" and that the Wilson administration had moved the university "away from its mission to serve our community in Detroit"...
Walter Lucken IV
December 7, 2020
activism, literature - detroit city
I grew up in a very small Midwestern town. The type of quaint and sleepy place where every neighbor waved to one-another and knew your brother, your cousin and your great grandmother. The private Christian elementary and middle schools I attended had a 100% white staff and student population. My public high school in the same town maintained roughly 98%. I believe the homogeneity of my surroundings and complete lack of representation or education about any other races, creeds, or colors, wove an intentional fabric of “blissful” ignorance which has taken me half my life to begin to unravel and reconstruct...
Christiana Laine
August 24, 2020
activism, literature - detroit city
What would it mean, as contemporary moderns, to recognize these areas, the hybrids, the blocks of movement of something which is in transition between what it was and what it will be? As many contemporary philosophers and anthropologists are beginning to see this need for control as paradoxical and highly problematic, they are asking “how do we break from these tendencies?” And "what kinds of potential comes with the suspension of our need for control?"...
Ashley Cook
June 8, 2020
activism, literature - detroit city
“Conscious awareness is a powerful tool to transcending unconscious patterns. It fosters an expanded perspective and openness to new possibilities. It is a process of recognizing what is going on inside and out, the effects of decisions and actions, and the interaction between the complex array of factors and forces. It is seeing, observing our thoughts, recognizing our feelings and the effect they are having on us and others; it functions as...
Ashley Cook
April 24, 2020
activism - detroit city