In this paper, running is de-anthropocised and re-conceptualised as emergent literacy. Due to our ‘natural[ised] ontological attitude’ and our adjacent training as scientists / academics, when we come across running children we tend to perceive ‘child’ and ‘environment’ first and reduce running to intentional movement of the former in relation to the latter. We tend to see children actively exploring their surroundings. This paper is an attempt to conceptualise running post-anthropocentrically, and as a literacy event. Diverse running events are sourced from everyday indoor and outdoor spaces of childhood in the UK and Finland. Rather than viewing running as something children do, we discuss running as ontologically a priori to ‘child’ – as giving rise to diverse modes of being a child. Children, we argue, do not initiate, govern or intend running. Rather different kinds of running emerge temporally, spatially and materially – all producing different variations of a ‘child’. In the running events we present, the nonhuman elements of the surroundings suggest, invite and make running happen. Slanted floors, long corridors, flat hard surfaces, rain and sleet, wind, music, distance between two trees, a fly, a ball. Rather than seeing agency or cause and effect in either the human or nonhuman players in these scenarios, we seek to move beyond these binaries, and instead think about the dance (Pickering, 2005), or correspondence (Ingold, 2013) through which human and non human entities respond to each other, create each other, “wrap around one another” (ibid, p.105). We draw on Pickering’s notion of the dance of agency, Ingold’s (2013) writing on animacy of human and more-than-human objects, and Sheets-Johnstone’s (1999) notion of thinking in movement to show how these running events are emerging posthuman literacies. By this we mean literacy events that come about through and in answer to the world, because “To correspond with the world, in short, is not to describe it, or to represent it, but to answer it.” (Ingold, 2013, p.108.) The resulting literacy is, then, one of being affected by your surroundings – of being-running because of the world. It is an emergent literacy beyond ‘becoming / being human’ (Pedersen 2015), and as such a biopolitical process (Livingston & Puar 2011).