Vic Thasiah, Ph.D.

About

Professor Vic Thasiah teaches in the environmental studies, religious studies, and honors programs. He's also the founder of Runners for Public Lands, a national advocacy organization that empowers runners to protect public lands and expand access to nature, where he continues to volunteer. Vic is currently working on developing an interdisciplinary field of inquiry called Trail Running Studies, which he sets out below.

Trail Running as a Way of Encountering the World

Trail running is more than a sport or form of recreation—it's a way of encountering and moving through the world. Every run brings a body into contact with terrain, weather, air quality, ecosystems, communities, technologies, histories, cultures, and institutions. As a complex, embodied, and situated practice interfacing with land and society, trail running shapes sensory, cognitive, and emotional states, and self-understanding, identity, and relationships with place.

What Trail Running Studies Does

Trail Running Studies (TRS) is an interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding these relationships, encompassing creative projects and research across the arts and humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and other forms of knowledge production. Rather than simply applying different disciplines to trail running, TRS uses trail running itself to bring different ways of knowing into conversation and generate new questions and perspectives. Building on existing work, the field aims to bridge academic and public divides and foster critical inquiry and dialogue among researchers, runners, communities, and institutions.

A Fragmented Body of Knowledge

Knowledge about trail running tends toward fragmentation. Exercise scientists study physiology, biomechanics, and performance; ecologists and land managers consider environmental impact and recreational access; economists and tourism scholars analyze events and destinations; brands focus on athletes and consumers; runners endlessly discuss training, gear, races, community, and experience; conservation organizations pursue advocacy and stewardship; and Indigenous scholars and communities engage many of the same landscapes through questions of sovereignty, dispossession, and ongoing relationships with ancestral homelands. TRS creates a space in which these different forms of inquiry—often separated by disciplinary, professional, and cultural boundaries—can connect and learn from one another.

Questions the Field Asks

The field asks questions such as: How does running through landscapes shape perception, attention, consciousness, and affect, and what kinds of knowledge and relationships to place emerge through repeated running? When does trail running lead to civic engagement advancing public health, unity across social divides, and conservation—and when does it fall short? How do Indigenous histories and continuing sovereignty intersect with the trail systems runners use, and who decides where trails get built, maintained, or closed? How do race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, geography, and culture shape access, belonging, and runner self-understanding—and how does trail running look different outside the Western contexts that dominate the field's current scope? How do everyday running practices and races transform landscapes and communities, including the wildlife, plants, and other life forms sharing those habitats? How do technologies mediate runners' relationships with their bodies and environments, from GPS watches and platforms like Strava to the vast records they generate of where and how people run? How is trail running being reshaped by wildfire, drought, extreme heat, and other consequences of a changing climate, and what does that reveal about the fragility of access to public land? What can film, writing, photography, and other creative practices reveal about running that data and analysis cannot? What happens to an informal recreational practice—and to the land it depends on—when it becomes a professional sport and a global industry? What values and identities does trail running cultivate, and what responsibilities accompany a recreational relationship with land? None of these questions belongs solely to exercise science, environmental history, or cultural criticism. They belong to all of them, and more, at once—which is why the field of trail running studies exists.

A Prismatic Lens

Trail running is like a prismatic lens: turn it one way and it reveals something about ecology and land management; turn it another and it reveals something about the body, the mind, and lived experience; turn it again and it reveals something about power, history, and who is allowed to belong on a given piece of ground. By holding these forms of knowledge together rather than apart, TRS uses trail running to explore both the sport itself and the larger questions it opens onto about our shared world.

Education

Certified California Naturalist

Ph.D., University of Oxford 

B.A., UC Santa Cruz

Expertise

Selected Course Topics

Environmental Justice (Honors)

Intro to Environmental Studies

Religion and Political Thought

Violence, Religion, and Politics

Religion, Identity, and Vocation

Zen Buddhism in the West

Current Work

Book project on recreation and conservation perspectives based on reading Chinese Mountains-and-Rivers Poetry and running trails on public lands

Selected Book Chapters

"Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh's Ecological Imagination," in Views of Nature and Dualism: Rethinking Philosophical, Theological, and Religious Assumptions in the Anthropocene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

"Race and Climate: Decolonizing Liberal Arts Education," in So That All May Flourish, eds. Marcia J. Bunge, Jason A. Mahn, and Martha E. Stortz (Fortress Press, 2023).

"Religion, Forestry, and Democracy in Rwanda after Genocide," in Eco-Reformation: Grace and Hope for a Planet in Peril, eds. Lisa E. Dahill and Jim Martin-Schramm (Wipf & Stock, 2016). Review.

"The Right to Freedom of Association: Organizing in Rwanda after Genocide," in On Secular Governance: Lutheran Perspectives on Contemporary Legal Issues, eds. Marie A. Failinger and Ronald W. Duty (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2016).

"Reconfiguring Rwandan Church-State Relations," in Lutheran Identity and Political Theology, eds. Carl Henric-Grenholm and Goran Gunner (Wipf & Stock, 2014).

Selected Journal Articles

"Equitable Access to Nature and Transformational Politics," Buddhist-Christian Studies, 44:1 (2024), 169-173.

"Collapsing Space and Time: Thich Nhat Hanh's Ecological Humanism," Journal of Buddhist Ethics, Vol. 29, 2022.

"Critically Engaging Public Officials in Rwanda," Studies in World Christianity 23:3 (2017), 257-280.

Selected Presentations

"Thich Nhat Hanh, a Mountain Forest, and Equitable Access to Nature," American Academy of Religion, San Antonio, Texas, November 18, 2023.

"Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on Environmental Justice," American Academy of Religion, Denver, Colorado, November 20, 2022.

"Toward an Asian-American Philosophy of Nature: Thich Nhat Hanh on Wildness and Wellness," American Academy of Religion (Western Region), March 20, 2021.

"Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh on Decolonizing Your Mind," American Academy of Religion, Denver, Colorado, November 19, 2018.

"Incubating Democracy in Development in Rwanda," Religion and Power: New Directions in Social Ethics Conference, Princeton University, March 12, 2015. Invited presentation.

"'Things Are Not Okay in Rwanda If You Shut Up': Community Organizing Practices and Human Rights Advocacy after Genocide," Society of Christian Ethics, Chicago, January 11, 2015.

"Countering Complicity: Rwandan Political Theology after Genocide," American Academy of Religion, San Diego, California, November 23, 2014.

"The Right to Freedom of Association: Organizing in Rwanda after Genocide," Lutheran Perspectives on Contemporary Legal Issues, Valparaiso University Law School, Chicago, March 27, 2014.

"Toward a Rwandan Political Theology," Remembering the Past, Living the Future: Lutheran Tradition in Transition Conference, University of Uppsala, Sweden, October 9, 2013.

"On Religious Anarchism," Third International Conference on Religion and Spirituality in Society, March 9, 2013.

"Second Realities: Karl Barth's Ethics and Socially-Engaged Art," Society of Christian Ethics (Pacific Meeting), February 10, 2012.

"On Comprehensive Immigration Reform," Society of Christian Ethics Annual Meeting, January 8, 2010.

"Faith and Immigration Reform," Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service Briefing, Washington, D.C., October 14, 2009. 

Public Writing

Vic's public writing and interviews have appeared at Outside Magazine, Trail Runner Magazine, iRunFar, and Freetrail, among other media and news outlets.

$1,250 CLU Sabbatical Grant, 2024

$5,000 CLU Faculty Research and Creative Work Grant, 2023

$1,250 Hewlett Faculty Research Grant, 2023

$40,000 Sabbatical Research Grant, Louisville Institute, 2017-2018

$5,000 CLU Faculty Research and Creative Work Grant, 2014

$5,000 Wabash Summer Research Grant, 2013

$1,250 Hewlett Faculty Research Grant, 2013