Just released! Reading with Reciprocity: A Feminist Move Towards Reviewing with Generosity (2021).

In the previous blog post, I detailed a project I was involved in earlier this year called Reading with Reciprocity run by The Ediths. In that post, I explained the contributor’s brief, what we did and how we did it. In this post, I am excited to share the final output that contributors cocreated. It’s such a wonderful way to wrap up the year. What a project! So exciting! Great ideas on how to research more generously. See more below. NG.

Bicycles Create Change.com 15th November 2021.Bicycles Create Change.com 15th November 2021.
Image: The Ediths

The Ediths are a feminist interdisciplinary research collective based at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. The collective uses socially engaged creative methodologies to conduct ecologically responsive research.

I am delighted to announce the Edith’s Reading with Reciprocity Project has just been released. Congratulations to the organisers, Mindy Blaise, Jane Merewether and Jo Pollitt and to all book responders.

I was very honoured to be invited to contribute to this project and to have my book response included.

Bicycles Create Change.com 15th November 2021.Bicycles Create Change.com 15th November 2021.

Reading with Reciprocity

Here’s The Edith’s overview of this project:

Reading with Reciprocity is an initiative by The Edith’s inspired by the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research’s (CLEAR) blog post, #Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity (2021), which draws on the scholarship of Joe Dumit (2012), Zoe Todd (2016), and Eve Tuck (2017) to learn reading practices that are “humble, generous, and accountable” (CLEAR, 2021).  We were interested and impressed with the ways in which this methodological experiment was creating reading practices grounded in a feminist ethic committed to making room for diverse knowledges.

This initiative began by first curating a list of books based on the research interests of the membership and our commitment to privileging different voices. After sending out an expression of interest, we were surprised and humbled at the overwhelming response to the invitation and selected 11 members to take part in Reading with Reciprocity. Similar to the care taken in deciding which books to read and review, we also selected members with consideration and intention, including representation of early career, mid-career, and experienced researchers. Because we see the roundtables as part of postgraduate supervision and an expanded form of mentoring, some of the students we supervise were also selected to participate.

Those who took part in Reading with Reciprocity were asked to read the (CLEAR) blog post, #Collabrary: a methodological experiment for reading with reciprocity (2021) and then submit a review that was based on reading a selected text with reciprocity. We hoped that participants would reciprocate the gifts that the authors had given in their writing.

Reimagining how we might read and review these books with care, reciprocity, and generosity ended up not being as easy as we first thought. It is clear that there is such a dominant way of reviewing work that makes being generous to authors so out of the ordinary and unsupported in the academy. We have to do better! Reading with Reciprocity is one way that we can do this work, individually and as a community of scholars who are interested in doing academia more kindly and generously.

The Ediths

I enjoy being part of The Edith’s collective because the group’s ethics, topics and discussions align so well with my research and personal interests. When we meet, we focus on exploring the material and situated effects of environmental change on feminist bodies and practices and the relations between social justice, ecological sustainability, and Indigenous self-determination. This means a strong commitment to the decolonization of Western knowledge production.

Being part of this research collective creates opportunities for dialogue and collaboration among feminists from diverse backgrounds and to contribute to the development of more just and sustainable societies – such as this Reading with Reciprocity project!

The Ediths also have a range of research offerings including publications, projects, a great series of talks called The Roundtable and other events.

It is so helpful for researcher-writers to have like-minded people to process, feed and be inspired by – I hope you have your own group that does this for you!

And if not, join one or create it yourself!

Keep Writing! Do Good! Stay Fierce!

New Materialisms SIG – Ghostly Matters

It’s Halloween season.   

What a perfect time to explore haunting and ghosts! 

For our final NM SIG for this year, we are focusing on ghostly matters, and in particular Barad’s (2010) Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations.  

Barad explores the disjointedness of time through electron behaviours, the nature of entanglement and the ethics of the Bohr/ Heisenberg Copenhagen meeting during WW2. 

An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future. As the quantum eraser experiment shows, it is not the case that the past (a past that is given) can be changed (contrary to what some physicists have said), or that the effects of past actions can be fully mended, but rather that the ‘past’ is always already open to change. (Barad, 2010, p.266) 

We are coupling this with the paper of Lisa Blackman (2019) exploring the organizational dynamics of knowledge and scientific truths in a digital age and the hauntological implications inherent in such processes. 

To help us work with the haunting nature of our research, bring along a ghostly image or story to contribute to the mix. 

What we did in this session

Janis did a wonderful job of preparing and hosting this session.

After our introduction, we did a series of warm up activities:

A word cloud with suggested ghostly terms

We then each had time to share our Ghostly Images.

Everyone had something different to share.

Some quick notes during this discussion:

  • Locations with histories and personalities, wants and needs, reverberations with bottle trees that ring and chime and send out affective resonances with musical sounds to alert, soothe and repel. 
  • Hanging in the tree – like words hanging in the air…things unspoken and ghastly or ghostly 
  • I cannot pass on until I have completed this task 
  • Humans being so reliant on the visual – with the unseen, the ‘dis’embodied’, the othering is more acute and ‘real’? How can that be…the less concrete it is, the more real the impact? 
  • We scare ourselves 
  • We spook ourselves and others 
  • Haunted by visions and experiences (PTSD), haunted by/in ‘life’ 
  • Haunted\haunting keeps returning to a moment?? 
  • Ghost is morally changed  
  • Have intention to scare 
  • Giving them agency to haunt us 

Alan Soko – quantum gravity nonsense findings 

Salvia Kind – a taxidermist bear in a playground 

The Bridge to Terabithia & euphemisms  apolitical and no-biological…adults conversations about death with children – so interesting! 

socialhaunting.com/song-lines-on-the-road 

Geoff Bright and Gabrielle Ivison – Ghost Labs & Social Haunting socialhaunting.com 

How NOT to be a mountain biker – My Ghostly Matters

For my contribution, I shared a popular MTB YouTube video which had recently been amended to blur out some content that at the time the video was published in 2013 was published in full, yet more recently has been picked up and challenged in 2021. The section in question explains MTB trail terminology by using a derogatory term for trans people as a joke.

Instead of removing the whole video, the producers chose to blur out the audio and visuals for that section only, leaving an eerie, ghostly trace of what was before. This elision and its haunted digital edited intervention speak to how/why content might/is changed and what is made un/known in the process. Such questions are very in line with Lisa Blackman’s work (see the reading).

For those interested in knowing more, my source comes from the extremely popular video called How To Be A Mountain Biker by IFHT Films. This video has more than 7,194,034 views since being released 24th October 2013.

The ghostly data section is at: (Step 18) 2.25mins – 2.34mins and looks like this:

New Materialisms SIG - Ghostly Matters. Bicycles Create Change.com 29th November 2021

Here is the current, redacted video in full:

Stretching and Murmuring

This session was really inspiring and thought-provoking. Each participant brought something completely different and I felt my brain being stretched and poked into new and interesting directions.

I came away from this session with much to think about.

Here are some of those murmurs from the Barad reading:

“Our debt to those who are already dead and those not yet born cannot be disentangled from who we are. What if we were to recognise that differentiating is a material act that is not about radical separation, but on the contrary, about making connections and commitments?  

An ethics of entanglement entails possibilities and obligations for reworking the material effects of the past and the future.  

Ethics is an integral part of the diffraction (ongoing differentiating) patterns of worlding, not a superimposing of human values onto the ontology of the world (as if ‘fact’ and ‘value’ were radically other). 

Entanglements are not a name for the interconnectedness of all being as one, but rather specific material relations of the ongoing differentiating of the world. Entanglements are relations of obligation – being bound to the other – enfolded traces of othering. Othering, the constitution of an ‘Other’, entails an indebtedness to the ‘Other’, who is irreducibly and materially bound to, threaded through, the ‘self’ – a diffraction/dispersion of identity.  

What if the ghosts were encountered in the flesh, as iterative materialisations, contingent and specific (agential) reconfigurings of spacetimematterings, spectral (re)workings without the presumption of erasure, the ‘past’ repeatedly reconfigured not in the name of setting things right once and for all (what possible calculation could give us that?”

Readings:

2021 Australian Walking and Cycling Conference

2021 Australian Walking and Cycling Conference. Bicycles Create Change.com 27th September 2021.

It’s that time of year again!

Woohoo!

The 2021 Australian Walking and Cycling Conference is on! Thursday the 30th of September and Friday the 1st of October – and this year it is all online!

This year’s theme is:  Global Lessons, Local Opportunities.

I have been to this conference a number of times in the past and I’ve always enjoyed it.

There is always a good mix of research, community, international and local perspectives, sustainability, urban planning, and new and interesting ideas.

I am definitely going to miss not seeing delegates in person, or doing the side-conference activities and events – they are a real highlight!

But even without the trimmings, I’m excited about this year’s program.

I’m looking forward to connecting with some old conference mates and meeting some new people and hearing what some of ‘the big issues’ are in cycling research.

I’ve been pouring over the abstracts and speakers, checking out the new projects, selecting what sessions to go to, and preparing notes to add to chat discussions during presentations.

Below are a few extra details -see more on the AWCC official website here.

I’ve listed the program at the end of this post for those interested.

For anyone going – I’ll (virtually) see you there!

2021 Australian Walking and Cycling Conference. Bicycles Create Change.com 27th September 2021.
AWCC 2019. Source: AWCC

Conference vision

The simple acts of walking and cycling have the potential to transform the places we live, our economies and how we engage with our environment. The Australian Walking and Cycling conference explores the potential for walking and cycling to not only provide for transport and recreation but solutions to challenges of liveability, health, community building, economic development and sustainability. As one of Australia’s longest-running, best-regarded and most affordable active travel conferences, we bring together practitioners and researchers from Australia and across the world to share their work and engage with conference participants.

The Australian Walking and Cycling Conference aims to send zero waste to landfill.

2021 Australian Walking and Cycling Conference. Bicycles Create Change.com 27th September 2021.
AWCC

Keynote speakers

I am very excited about the keynotes speakers – especially Meredith. I have been following her work for a while (total researcher fan-girl crush!) and she is kick-ass! Meredith is also a consummate speaker, so I can’t wait to hear her present on her current work. Double Woohoo!

Meredith Glaser is an American urban planner, lecturer, and sustainable mobility researcher, based in the Netherlands since 2010. At the Urban Cycling Institute (University of Amsterdam), her research focuses on public policy innovation, knowledge transfer, and capacity building for accelerated implementation of sustainable transport goals. She is one of the world’s most experienced educators for professionals seeking to learn Dutch transport planning policies and practices. She also manages academic output for several European Commission projects and sits on the advisory committee of the Cycling Research Board. Meredith holds master’s degrees in public health and urban planning from University of California, Berkeley.

Fiona Campbell has been working for the City of Sydney since 2008 and is the Manager Cycling Strategy. She is deeply committed to making Sydney a bike-friendly city and to helping others achieve similar goals. Fiona is currently managing the roll out of 11 new City of Sydney cycleway projects, three of which are permanent designs to upgrade temporary Covid-19 pop-up cycleways. Fiona mostly rides a Danish (Butchers and Bicycles) cargo trike, and on weekends accompanied by two Jack Russells. Fiona will present on “Global lessons, local opportunities”. This title is also the Conference theme.

My Teaching and Learning Manifesto

I have been thinking a lot about what teaching and learning means to me.

I am entering the last year of my bikes-for-education PhD research while continuing to work amidst a range of significant social, political, economic, health and educational changes.

I thought about what informs, sustains and inspires my personal pedagogy – and I am grateful for the opportunities that I have – and the opportunities I get to share with others.

As part of this reflection, I wrote my first ever Teaching and Learning Manifesto.

I did this to identify what was most important to me – a kind of reinforcing personal statement.

It is a public declaration of my educational principles, approaches or intentions.

It was challenging, revealing and reassuring to do – and totally worth it!

My manifesto has 12 leading principles that encapsulate my current approach to teaching and learning.

My manifesto outlines what and how I co-create my educational passion.

I will update it regularly to incorporate changes over time.

Below is my Teaching and Learning Manifesto (2021).

My Teaching and Learning Manifesto. Bicycles Create Change.com. 31st May 2021.
Nina’s T & L Manifesto (2021)

Mother’s Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents (Disruptive Edit)

Mother's Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents. Bicycles Create Change.com. 12th May 2021.
Image: Annie Spratt

Dear Reader. If this is your first time on this blog – it is best not to start with the post below. This post is a disruptive edit expert-iment that begins ‘in the middle’. It will not make much sense if you’ve not seen some of my previous posts. Some of these posts (like the Geography and Collective Memories post – which you should check out) are getting increasingly ‘loose’ and ‘messy’ and working with ‘in-progress’ sensemaking – thus leading into more disruptive edits like this one. If you are new, perhaps start with the ‘clean and tidy’ version of this post – it is called Mother’s Day 2021 and is the precursor-basis for the exploration below.

If you are up for something different, read on!

*NB: this post is best read on a desktop – might be a little (more) odd if on a mobile device*

This post is not what it seems…well…. it is… and it isn’t.

What started out as a ‘normal’ post morphed into something else. Usually, blog posts are straightforward: informative, factual, opinion, or instructional. While I was writing on the topic ‘Mothers Day’ for this post – disruptive ideas and opportunities emerged. So… instead of ignoring or disregarding them, I embraced them. You could say this was also an experiment in applying diffraction thinking-doing (my theoretical approach I am using for my PhD) to other-than academic writing. This is new territory for me (to write) and for you (to read). What diffraction writing means here, is that instead of only sharing the usual polished final blog post, I’ve experimented with folded into the blog post my thinking-process-editing as I am writing it – a kind of disruptive writing-with blog post process. It might be a little weird and may or may not work. there will be typos and mistakes – some parts will just be notes or ‘snaps’ – resist the urge to edit for ‘correctness’. But I like the idea of doing something new and challenging what I think writing, especially such public writing! is or should be, going ‘beyond’, and being (more publicly) transparent with writing-as-process expert-iments . To try and show how this is working, the blog post content is in black text and the process content is in superscript like this . It would be easier to do this in a word document with track change comments which I have included below as a file for those interested in seeing it, but the here challenge is to see how it works within the functionality of a Word Press.org blog post.

We’ll see how it goes. Good luck to us all! NG.

Insert image of mum. Use creative commons to support alt artists. Attribute/link to promote photographer – preferably female. Use an image of other-than mainstream blond mum stereotype (in this case a redhead!) = have some sort of diversity to show a greater range of mums (blond mums already have a strong presence and representation online). See ‘undisrupted’ version of this post for alt (M)othering image

Mother’s Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents

8th May is Mother’s Day.

Happy Mother’s Day mums – and dads and significant others and carers who also fill maternal roles. Dads and other/carers: I added this is it did not feel right to only single out ‘mums’ as there are many ‘others’ who are not officially a’ mother’ – yet who equally fulfil a similar role. A homage to my commitment to better recognizing the fluid and diverse experiences of what ‘mothering’ is – and I was raised by my father who was a consummate ‘mother’ and father and many other things…

For a previous Mother’s Day, I wrote about the issues I had with some Mother’s Day ‘suggested gifts for cycling mums’.

If you haven’t read my post Happy Fearful Mother’s Day Cycling Mums! check it out here – it’s well worth the read! Internal Hyperlink: I link back to my own blog to promote past writing and keep readership ‘inside’ my website where – also helped remind me of the amount of work I have already done and share from the archives … I LOVE the image I sourced for this hyperlinked post

I appreciate the sentiment of Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day) in taking time to recognise and celebrate the input and work mums do. I didn’t want this post to be ‘too negative’ or ‘down with Mum’s day’ – that’s not what I think or mean – I wanted some balance and make sure I acknowledge the positives of Mother’s Day.

I like to think that mums are always appreciated as they are on Mother’s Day (ie for the other 364 days of the year as well) – not just one day a year … anyhoo…

Mums have it especially? tough.                                                                                                   

Women are advantaged in society and mothers in particular face enduring and unfair social and corporate pressures and constraints around childcare, unpaid labour, taking the load for emotional labour (the unpaid job men still don’t understand) and ‘being a good mother’, inequitable divisions of household labour, the hidden and overlooked value-cost-effort of stay-at-home mums and that working mums (well…all women) on average make only 82 cents  for every dollar earned by men.

Christine Carter articulates these frustrations well in her piece: All I want for Mother’s Day is an equitable division of labour. Wanted to synthesis some facts into the post AND source more widely (ie not only read academic lit) AND get some mums voices in here. I’m hyperconscious that I’m not a mother, so am only presenting my POV on gender issues – not commenting on what it is like to BE a mum as that is not my direct, personal lived experience so I don’t feel comfortable commenting on that – so I made a point to look for mums who have written on this topic and found this great article on emotional labor. It fit in beautifully. So funny – I had a conversation with a dear friend on this very topic…I think I’ll flip her this link as well! And yes… it is ‘a thing’…still!

With much work needed to address these systemic gender inequities, Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognise these issues and celebrate mums and other female carers.

Traditionally, this means breakfast in bed, flowers, or lunches out with loved ones. link back here to ‘presents’ and conventional Mother’s Day approaches to lead into my final takeaway idea/content.

For cycling mums, it’s an opportunity to think more thoughtfully about the cycling presence and presents we give to mums and what these ‘gifts’ communicate, expect and perpetuate.

As I was writing this post, I’ve changed the title a few times. The changes reflect the different ‘moves’ I went through in writing the content – so in the spirit of transparent disruption – I am including that process here as well. It was at this stage of writing the post that I looked a the title and thought: ‘that title doesn’t fit anymore. The following section is a brief behind the scene thinking-editing-doing that went on at this stage. For reading ease I have not super-scripted this section despite it all being thinking-writing-as-process content.

I like the image above. It presents a not blond, white mum(gender?) House is a little messy and not presenting a ‘perfectly’ curated photo/family and the black LHS is suggestive of the ‘dark side’ of family life – fits well with overall post themes. It also helps break up blog content and helps separate the next section which is a new and different idea/focus.

Title: re-writing and re-righting

Initially the title was: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presents, please!

It was tight and communicated the initial content main ideas. But it only named the ‘presents’ aspect, which was a very minor idea and didn’t fully capture the relational, non-commercial call to action I was putting forward.

So the next edit was: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presents and presence, please!

I liked the homonym and alliteration of presents and presence – it fitted well with what I wanted to highlight. I looked at the order of the two keywords ‘presents’ and ‘presence’ and wonder how changing their placement might change the impact of the meaning of my overall message. I swapped them around to see that changed. I wanted to start with the known (presents) and end/lead into the blog main idea (presence) – so that was the final word order I chose.

Then: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presence and presents, please!

I looked at the: , please. It is polite. Too polite. I took it out. I was pandering to social mores that dictate women should be polite, not cause trouble or be bothersome…pandering to people-pleasing? As Gemma Hartley says, mums are ‘just fed up’ and what is needed (and most wanted) is a ‘deep clean.

So I removed the: , please. It is a stronger statement – declarative and instructional, not a request and thus leaving open the final decision as to whether to act on this ‘request’ or not to other-than-the-mother-saying it .

Note to self: remove (more): , please(s).

Apply liberally – in general and elsewhere.

So then it was: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presence and presents!

This was closer to the sentiment I wanted to convey. It is short and punchy and fits into (no more than) two lines of text as a heading – which is a good ‘grab’ for the WordPress RHS margin widget ‘Recent Posts’. The exclamation mark as an end made it read more of an imperative – but perhaps a little shouty – so I removed it. But then it was left hanging. I also wanted to give some notice as to the type of presentation/format this also helps with search features later on So I added: (Disruptive Edit) at the end. I added ‘Give’ at the start as I wanted to include mention of the action that was the crux of the post giving is a nice thing to do! I wanted the title to include someone doing something – and it read-felt much better with ‘give’. Then I stopped. gotta know when to stop! send it out now – share your process work, resist being ‘correct’ ‘right’ and ‘good’ just get it out there – it is in-process and raw so no more tinkering!

Final title: Mother’s Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents (Disruptive Edit)

..then finish the blog content and close on a positive!

Interesting to note that WordPress backend drafting notifications (like the readability analysis, SEO, suggested ‘revisions’) are going crazy pining me to check and recheck. I have a list of sad red face emojis letting me know NEEDS IMPROVEMENT! – its the algorithm reminding me that this type of post ‘won’t work’ and is ‘not normal’ writing and formatting. I am ingoring them all.

(*PHEW*)

…and that dear reader is a little sneak-peak into some of the in-process ideas, considerations and edits that happen during the construction of blog posts!

Thanks for coming a long for this experimental ride into a disruptive edit!

Stay amazing and see you next time.

 

Bikes, Maps & Emotions

Biking, Maps & Emotion. Bicycles Create Change.com. 15th December 2020.
Image: Greenwhich Emotion Map by Christian Nold.

Recently I’ve been preoccupied with maps.

Maps are ubiquitous and we’ve all used them at some stage:  schematic maps of bus routes,  locating ‘you are here’ to explore a city, finding the nearest train station, driving to a new destination or going on holiday. As a bike rider, I use maps to check and navigate direction, connection, location or distance, and points of interest.

Maps are used to communicate information about places.

Historically, under the guise of ‘exploration’, maps enabled geo-political or economic motives such as colonial expansion, mercantile ambitions and violent extractivism. Such utility speaks to the epitome of rationality: objective, cold and calculated. 

But maps are more than just geospatial wayfaring tools.

Maps are also gendered. Mapping the physical world has been, until more recently, the domain of masculine perceptions and control of resources, governance, power and administration. Maps of yore were solely created by male cartographers for male users. In doing so, they showed a very selective promotion of what was considered ‘significant’ and detailed interpretations as to ‘what is on the ground’ or located in environments – both physical and socio-cultural. Female and non-binary ways of moving, traveling, experiencing and journeying have been largely ignored or overlooked in cartography.

Thankfully, things have changed since then – and so have maps and maps users.

As part of my bicycle research, I read a lot about bike riding in different spaces, places, terrains and environments. As a New Materialisms researcher, I’m especially interested in embodiment, relationality, movement and the affective intensities of bike riding.

This means I’m look at maps differently and I’m interested in considering how gender and emotionality feature in mapping.

Maps elicit emotions: 

  • I feel anger knowing modern maps negate the abuse of indigenous peoples
  • I feel frustration when the place I want to get to is not shown on the map
  • I feel satisfaction when I finally get to the location I want
  • I feel connected when I recognise a familiar route
  • I feel nostalgia when I trace trails of past beloved adventures

Today, I am thinking of the absences in physical cartographies and considering:

How can maps/mapping better attend to the intersectionality of gendered journeys, bike riding and emotionality?

I thought I’d share a few of the initial considerations I’ve come across so far.

Biking, Maps & Emotion. Bicycles Create Change.com. 15th December 2020.
Image: Stockport Emotion Map – a collective public-consultation-art project Stockport Local Council (2007)

Cyclists’ participation in Emotional Mapping

Emotional mapping is an approach to capture how users of a space ‘feel’ or emotionally relate to spaces. This approach is used by those interested in engaging with how end uses feel as a way to enhance functionality, design and process, people like educators, policymakers and city planners.

As many cities work to encourage more bike riding, cyclists are a central target user group who have significant value to add by expressing their emotional reactions to routes and places. Cyclists experience spaces definitely to other users and have very clear reactions to lines, paths and points that are shown statically on a map of the city, but yet manifest emotionally, such as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ places, or places to avoid because of anxiety, safety fears, or desire lines for the familiar and ‘fun’ routes. Such emotionally-charged choices and behaviours are not adequately represented on static maps – hence the addition of emotional mapping.

Emotional mapping is volunteered geographical information and/or crowdsourcing as a way to boost citizen participation in urban planning and it provides a platform for alternative voices and experiences to be better accounted for.

Emotional mapping foregrounds the importance of natural and built environments for cyclists, as well as the range of feelings engendered by cycling close to car traffic or in the street with cars, or traversing natural environments and obstacles.

Biking, Maps & Emotion. Bicycles Create Change.com. 15th December 2020.
Cyclists’ participation in Emotional Mapping. Image: Cartographic Perspectives

Emotional Cartographies: Technologies of the Self

This entry comes direct from the ever-inspiring Brainpickings by Maria Popva. Say no more.

Emotional Cartography is an excellent, free book on emotion mapping, featuring a collection of essays by artists, designers, psychologists, cultural researchers, futurists and neuroscientists. Together, they explore the political, social and cultural implications of dissecting the private world of human emotion with bleeding-edge technology.

From art projects to hi-tech gadgets, the collection looks at emotion in its social context. It’s an experiment in cultural hacking — a way to bridge the individual with the collective through experiential interconnectedness.

Download the book in PDF here, for 53 glorious pages of technology, art and cultural insight.

Biking, Maps & Emotion. Bicycles Create Change.com. 15th December 2020.
Image: Emotional Cartography

Bike T-shirt with Map Icons 

I found this innovative bike T-shirt design by StorySpark on Etsy.  Although not technically a map in the true sense of the word,  I found this generative for a number of reasons.  I like the provocation that instead of mapping spaces, it was using map icons to trace experiences with the bike as opposed to on the bike. I like that it’s described as a ‘Pathfinder Cyclist Graphic’  and that it’s gender-neutral. 

When I first saw it, I saw it I thought it was using cosmology and celestial constellations which I thought that was cool, but when I looked closer and realised it was using familiar map icons, it worked just as well.

It also speaks to my ethical compunctions to support artists (an innovative and unique creative output) and the environment (this eco-friendly T-shirt is made From organic cotton and recycled polyester). I see this as a wonderful example to think more divergently about ‘mapping’ and is a creative reframing of mapping bicycle experiences anew.

Biking, Maps & Emotion. Bicycles Create Change.com. 15th December 2020.
Bike T-shirt with Map Icons. Image: StorySpark (Etsy)

Heat maps for cycling flows

Cycling heat maps show the intensity of movement in spaces. Usually, a cycling heat map is city-based and created by cyclists who download an app which tracks ride data. This is then collated into a visualisation to enable new perspective and insights to emerge that might not have been considered before.

This is useful to represent changes in movement and places over time. So things that are not shown on traditional static maps, like traffic jams, peak hours, changes in routes, most used routes (and when) are documented. There are also a few women’s only heat maps underway so as to compare ‘general’ users to ascertain differences.

What I like about these heat maps is that changes in flow is foregrounded and temporality (time) can more directly be folded into the map/ped/ing experience. I also like that the ‘heat’ terminology hints at the heat of bodies (riders), warm climate (environmental temperature or humidity) and ‘hot spots’ (such as avoidances, blockages or issues). Some pretty cool future potentialities here.

Also the use of ‘heat’ body 

Here is an example of a cycling heat map project for Berlin, Vienna and Graz.

Biking, Maps & Emotion. Bicycles Create Change.com. 15th December 2020.
Heat Maps for Cycling Flows. Image: Bicycle Citizens

Using Strava GPS to be a bike ride map artist

This idea has been around for a while and many bike riders would have seen these before. I’m not sure how well-known they are outside of cycling communities. These are fun, dynamic, creative and wholly bike-focused, movement-based moment-in-time expressions of user (re)mapping. These approaches reinvent modern mapping with the user reinterpreting the map using technology which could not have been achieved previously. These are also freely available and shared. 

Here, bike rides transcend exercise, competition and transportation to press into more unfamiliar (and exciting) territories such as public art and performance. Kudos to the bike rider-creative-(re)mapper whose interpretation and commitment in order to produce these pieces: I  appreciate the careful planning and organisation needed to make these pieces happen. There is also a telescoping aspect of the riders understanding their trip as being (literally) larger and more significant than just the route in front of them…I love the idea of riding for a purpose that can be seen from outer space! Here, a known map which is a social product embodying a range of histories and ideologies in and of itself is iteratively reimagined by each individual rider into a (re)newed vision, commentary or reality. 

Biking, Maps & Emotion. Bicycles Create Change.com. 15th December 2020.
Google search: bike strava art map

These are a few entry points so far and each have their own usefulness, limitations and possibilities. 

I’ll be exploring other ways to think differently about how mapping might better attend to gendered bike riding and emotionality and let you know what I find.

I hope you enjoyed this thought-experiment.

Enjoy mapping your next ride!

New Materialisms SIG: PlayTank Collective

For this session, we were delighted to have incredible minds behind the Melbourne-based PlayTank Collective – Alicia Flynn, Sarah Healy and Allie Edwards present a session entitled: Lessons from the Play Tank: Adventures in playful scholarship. 

New Materialism SIG: The PlayTank Collective. Bicycles Create Change.com 30th July 2020.

Abstract

 In this session, we will discuss a workshop that was created to enact NM theories and provide a playful and collaborative space to re-think, re-imagine, re-(   ) research for participants at the AARE 2019 conference. Working between the disciplines of art education and design, we embraced the opportunity to create this workshop in a way that attended to the joys and curiosities that we experienced while working/playing together in a material way. This collaboration was intentionally responsive and response-able, allowing us to experience a different way of being academics together, and enabling us to create a workshop that offered the same opportunity for those joining us in our session. 

We will share some of the insights from our process of creating the workshop, some highlights and images from the workshop, and pose the question we now have: 

What does this workshop make possible, both for us as researchers and for the people who participated in it?

Is this a method that allows people to practice more affirmative and ethical ways of working/playing/being together?

Twitter: @PlayTankCo

Alicia Flynn @LeishFly

Sarah Healy- @eduTH1NK

Alli Edwards – @allinote

New Materialism SIG: The PlayTank Collective. Bicycles Create Change.com 30th July 2020.
Session Activity: 100 word collaborative brainstorm

Session highlights

Sarah and Alli (and Alicia) not only presented, but also took us on an engaging 2-hour journey through their ideas, inspirations, readings, discussions and no less than two 100s (Stewart, 2010) writing activities (see image) and left us with the enticing thought:

What does this experience make possible, both for us as researchers and for the people who participated in it?

Part of the framing for this session was this incredible piece that Alicia read out:

“Imagine a pattern. This pattern is stable, but not fixed. Think of it in as many dimensions as you like – but it has more than three. This pattern has many threads of many colours, and every thread is connected to, and has a relationship with, all the others. The individual threads are every shape of life. Some – like human, kangaroo, paperbark – are known to Western science as “alive”; others, like rock, would be called “non-living”, but rock is there, just the same. Human is there, too, though it is neither the most nor the least important thread – it is one among many, equal with the others. The pattern made the whole is in each thread, and all the threads together make the whole. Stand close to the pattern and you can focus on a single thread ; stand a little further back and you can see how that thread connects to others; stand further back still and you can see it all – and it is only once you see it all that you recognise the pattern of the whole in every individual thread. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, and the whole is in all its parts. This is the pattern that the Ancestors made. It is life, creation, spirit, and it exists in Country” (Kwaymullina, 2005, p. 12).

*Kwaymullina, A. (2005). Seeing the light: Aboriginal law, learning and sustainable living in country. Indigenous Law Bulletin, 6(11), 12-15

New Materialism SIG: The PlayTank Collective. Bicycles Create Change.com 30th July 2020.

For this meeting we had 2 readings:

Braidotti, R. (2009). On putting the active back into activism. New Formations, (68), 42. doi:10.3898/NEWF.68.03.200

Stewart, K. (2010). Worlding refrains. In M. Gregg & G. J. Seigworth (Eds.), The affect theory reader (pp. 337 -353). Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

Session note: A great question from last meeting that emerged out of the readings was: What is ‘the second corporeal turn in social theory’ referred to in Taylor and Ivinson (2013, p 666)? This question stemmed from this quote here: “Such moves reinforce earlier feminist theories (Butler 1990; Grosz 1994), and speak back to the second corporeal turn in social theory (e.g. Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; Foucault 1979; Merleau-Ponty 1962, 1968; Shilling 2008) and within education (Evans, Rich, and Davies 2009; James 2000; Prout 2000; Walkerdine 2009). We indend to discuss this further!

Pedalling from Courage

As part of my bike PhD, I get to read lots of great bicycle inspired literature. Some of this awesome research includes Mike Lloyd’s bike research on the non-looks of the mobile world, new developments in no-nose saddle research and international projects like Paulus Maringka’s Greencycle Project in NZ.

Some academic publications are a bore to read, but there are the rare few that are accessible and engaging.

Today, I am sharing one that fits that bill. It is a reflection piece in the most recent issue of the Journal of Narrative Politics. It is by Manu Samnotra.

This article includes 7 vignettes, each of which shows various insights into Manu’s Florida bike-university-international lifeworld. I have chosen one particular vignette, to share here, which is the fourth in the paper (pg 62-63) which is the shortest vignette. It was originally presented as a one-paragraph moment. I chose this piece as it is concise, familiar and accessible (clearly written and articulated and not overly theoretical – thank goodness!).

Although it is an academic publication, it is a personal piece that bike riders can relate too. Elsewhere in the article, Manu explores themes or family, mobility, education, immigration/citizenship, friendship, community and more.

Manu’s writing is not at all cumbersome or heavily referenced (which is a unique feature of the Journal of Narrative Politics). I’d recommend checking out the whole article (see below). I have changed the layout of this section to better suit the blog format. Enjoy! NG.

Samnotra, M. (2020). Pedaling from Courage. Journal of Narrative Politics, 6(2).

Pedalling from Courage. Bicycles Create Change.com 27th June 2020.

We were on our bicycles on our way to the university, rolling on a path unmarred by borders and hierarchies. We saw two figures in the distance.

Pedaling.

Perhaps we registered its novelty; in this neighborhood where we rarely saw any children, and where there were no cars parked during the day, it was strange to see pedestrians walking in the middle of the street. Whirring. We were discussing what we might cook that night for dinner.

Pedaling.

We hear voices now, distant voices, and there is shouting. The road is much smoother in this part of the ride. Whirring. We exchange glances. As we get closer, we notice that the figures in the distance, getting nearer to us every moment, are not white. The color of their skin became apparent before anything else.

Pedaling.

We see now that one of them is gesticulating. Sticking arms out sideways, questioning.

Pedaling.

We notice now that one of them is a man. We hear his words clearly. He is angry. He is insulting her. Whirring. He is demanding that she stop what she is doing and acknowledge him. A few feet away, and we realize that the woman is walking ahead of the man. Whirring. Her body is stiffened, but not in the way that suggests that they are strangers. Whirring. She is trying to maintain a distance between them. As we are about to cross them, the man stretches forward and punches her. It grazes the back of her head. She stumbles but quickly regains her footing and keeps walking.

Pedaling.

We two cyclists look at each other.

Pedaling.

We are already a block down the path before we realize what we have seen. Whirring. No, that is not right. We know what we saw. Whirring. It just takes us that long to acknowledge what we have seen. She wants to stop pedaling. Our bikes come to skidding halt. She was always braver than me. I tell her not to stop.

Pedaling.

We cover the rest of the distance until we reach the university where we finally consider what we have seen.


Manu Samnotra teaches political theory at the University of South Florida. He can be reached at msamnotra@usf.edu

To Zen on a bicycle

I came across this Zen proverb while looking for bicycle-related folklore and fairy tales.

A lovely reminder to enjoy being fully in the present moment when riding a bike.

To Zen on a bicycle and back. Bicycles Create Change.com 25th April 2020.
Image: Yakima Herald

A Zen teacher saw five of his students returning from the market, riding their bicycles.

When they arrived at the monastery and had dismounted, the teacher asked the students, “Why are you riding your bicycles?”

The first student replied, “The bicycle is carrying this sack of potatoes. I am glad that I do not have to carry them on my back!” The teacher praised the first student. “You are a smart boy! When you grow old, you will not walk hunched over like I do.”

The second student replied, “I love to watch the trees and fields pass by as I roll down the path!” The teacher commended the second student, “Your eyes are open, and you see the world.”

The third student replied, “When I ride my bicycle, I am content to chant nam myoho renge kyo.” The teacher gave his praise to the third student, “Your mind will roll with the ease of a newly trued wheel.”

The fourth student replied, “Riding my bicycle, I live in harmony with all sentient beings.” The teacher was pleased and said to the fourth student, “You are riding on the golden path of non-harming.”

The fifth student replied, “I ride my bicycle to ride my bicycle.”

The teacher sat at the feet of the fifth student and said, “I am your student.”’


Zen proverb

To Zen on a bicycle and back. Bicycles Create Change.com 25th April 2020.
Image: CNN

Mike Lloyd’s bike research: The non-looks of the mobile world.

Mike Lloyd’s Bicycle Research: The non-looks of the mobile world. Bicycles Create Change.com 6th July, 2019.
Image: @Space4cyclingbne

In this post, we look at a recent publication by Mike Lloyd, entitled The non-looks of the mobile world: a video-based study of interactional adaptation in cycle-lanes.

Mike Lloyd is an Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies with Victoria University (Wellington, NZ). His research interests include ethnomethodology, sociology of everyday life, cycling and interaction and more recently video methodologies.

I initially contacted Mike after reading his article about NZ MTB trail rage – which was an absolute delight.

Since then, this blog has previously hosted two of Mike’s articles:

But I also still find myself returning to some of his earlier publications that explore media, cartoons and risqué humour via analysis of content such as The Adventures of Naked Man, Flight of the Concords and ‘dick joke’ competitions – my kind of academic!

See a full list of Mike’s work here.

Mike is coming to Brisbane in November for the International Cycling Safety Conference. So we are hoping to go for a ride together! Woohoo!

Mike Lloyd’s Bicycle Research: The non-looks of the mobile world. Bicycles Create Change.com 6th July, 2019.
Image: Mike Lloyd (2019)

Article: The non-looks of the mobile world

In this particular article, Mike examines how cyclists and pedestrians in cycle-lane space adapt their interactions with each other, paying particular attention to the role of looking and non- looking as it unfolds moment-by-moment.  

Any bike rider will be able to read and totally appreciate the happenings in this article.

It is very interesting exploring how differences between pedestrians ‘doing and being oblivious’  impact cyclists in bike lanes.

I also like the analytical focus of dissecting action and the absence of looking – or non-looks. Original, interesting and pertinent to all cyclists!

Other key concepts from this article that stand out are: the gaze to shift another pedestrian, direction of views, standing in bike lanes, people getting out of cars, pedestrians and mobile phones, ‘observer’s maxim’ moving for public transport and my favourite: glance, action, apology.

Creatively, Mike uses video still data from a bicycle Go-Pro to explain key theoretical concepts and outcomes.

His writing is well researched, interesting and entertaining.

This article is valuable contribution to extend discussions of how bicycles and cycle-lane use feature within mobility, space/infrastructure and situational interactions discourse.

The Abstract

This empirical study uses video data to examine interactional adaptation between cyclists and pedestrians in a relatively new cycle-lane. Existing research on intersections shows order is achieved through the frequent use of a look-recognition-acknowledgement sequence. Whereas this is found in the cycle-lane interactions, there is also an important divergent technique which on the surface seems less cooperative.

Others are made to cede space based on ‘doing and being oblivious’, in short, forms of non-looking force others to take evasive action and subtly alter their line of travel. Here the dynamic nature of this obliviousness is shown through empirical examples.

 Even though it is not always easy to distinguish between the two forms of non-looking, it is concluded that ‘doing oblivious’, whilst possibly annoying for others, is most probably harmless, but there are good reasons to be more concerned about ‘being oblivious’, for it may lead to collisions between pedestrians and cyclists.

Aspects of non-looking provide an important addition to knowledge of the mobile world, suggesting we renew attention to specific sites where people concert their movements in minutely detailed ways.

Lloyd, M. (2019). The non-looks of the mobile world: a video-based study of interactional adaptation in cycle-lanes. Mobilities, 1-24. doi:10.1080/17450101.2019.1571721