No. 50 - Tom Van Hout: Beyond the gaze: Rhythms of surveillance, care, and recognition in the transcontinental race

This paper examines the Transcontinental Race (TCR), a self-supported ultra-distance cycling event across Europe, as a site where surveillance, care, and recognition intersect in complex ways. Drawing on two autoethnographic reflections from the 2023 (TCRNo9) and 2025 (TCRNo11) editions of the race, the paper traces a shift in how mediated practices shape riders’ experiences and relationships. I analyze race tracking technologies and online reporting as forms of participatory, benign surveillance: GPS traces, digital narratives, and spectators’ affective investments create a shared rhythm of visibility that connects riders, organizers, volunteers, and audiences. At the same time, the race experience inevitably exceeds surveillant gazes, foregrounding embodied rhythms, sensory intensities, and affective encounters that cannot be fully captured by digital traces. By integrating both perspectives, the paper conceptualizes the TCR as a communicative figuration that continuously reorganizes visibility, agency, and care. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on mediatization, mobility, and the relational dynamics of surveillance.

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About the Author:

Tom Van Hout

Tom Van Hout is Associate Professor at the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences at Tilburg University. In 2018, he was ZeMKI Visiting Research Fellow. He is interested in how people do things with media and discourse. His theoretical background is in discourse studies. He studies how meaning is produced (as well contested, altered, amplified, distorted and so on) in a range of communicative contexts. Key sites for studying such communicative contexts include popular culture, museums and news media. Three social practices anchor his research interests: Performing expertise (How people express intimacy with culturally valuable things such as wine, fashion, or fitness), anticipating audiences (how organizations and institutions attract, maintain and position audiences semiotically), and representing social events (how migration, politics, capitalism and other social events of scale are mediated and mediatized across platforms and mediascapes).