Event Archives - Page 3 of 16

30/10/202015/01/2021

Halloween Bikes 2020

We don’t have a strong culture of celebrating Halloween in Australia. But given many readers of this blog are in countries that do celebrate Halloween – this post is for you!

Previously I have shared Halloween-themed posts – like the super-fun Homewood Witch’s Ride (Alabama, USA) where everyone dresses up in awesome outfits and go for a ride around town.

Also, the Mala Bruja Alleycat (New York City, USA), which is held the night before Halloween, on Witch’s Eve which is an all-women’s courier-inspired alleycat fun-but-serious race-ride where you tick off checkpoints along the way. (More events like this please!)

Halloween Bikes 2020: Ideas for events & costumes

So for a fun bike-themed Halloween 2020, you will need a bike-and-costume and a kick-ass bike event to go to….so here two ideas to encourage you to get your ‘spooky self’ (and family + friends) on bikes and riding your local neighbourhood for Halloween 2020.

Halloween Bikes 2020. Bicycles Create Change.com 31st October 2020.

2020 Zombie Bike Parade

The 2020 Zombie Bike Parade (what a wicked idea!) was a collaboration between local bike shop Davis Cyclery and BIKE City Theatre Company (Bike City USA). This event invited the local community to dress up and join in for an afternoon ride around the Davis Bike Loop for a massive Zombie Bike extravaganza.

As well as mixing with locals, the Bike City Theatre Company and their team of sketch writers, directors and actors provided entertainment and an event like no other! The dancers did a great job of zombifying dance moves that keep everyone humming along. They had fun, laughs, socially distanced photo ops and an unforgettable community bike-themed Halloween experience. Here are a few snaps from the event and you can see more here.

Bike-Themed Characters & Costumes

If you are just cruising around your neighbourhood for general spookiness (and not a themed event – like the Zombie Ride above) then you can diversify your costume – and anything goes!

Online, you can find heaps of websites, pictures and DIY videos of creative and fun bike-themed costumes. Some websites have links to buy the products featured – but like most people, I will ALWAYS opt to make my own version out of recycled materials.

Any mum’s DIY YouTube video is great for tutorials on how to make costumes at home. More sustainable, more personal! Here are a few of my favs from Bikes Reviewed.

Headless Horse (Biker) Man
Pac Man Pair
ET & Elliot (a classic!)
Evel Knievel
Pee Wee Herman

So what ever you do for Halloween 2020 – have heaps of fun doing it on ya bike!

01/10/202028/11/2020

Bike Birthdays

October is the month of my birthday (hooray!) and it got me to thinking about how bikes might feature in birthday celebrations.

So in honour of my own – and all the other people-rider-birthdayers – this post looks at some creative, kooky and conventional ways bikes can be used for an awesome birthday celebration via the 3 main elements of invitations, food and cakes.

For any other bike-related ideas like locations, games, decorations and activities, there are heaps of websites and ideas on Pinterest. The ideas here are just an entry point to get the inspiration flowing for you next bike-themed birthday party.

For whenever your birthday is….Happy bikey birthday!

Bike Birthday Invite Cards

Of course, you need to let people know it’s your birthday and invites are key. Invitations are a very personal choice and show your particular personality and passion. As well as confirming key birthday event information, invites can also visually set the tone and expectation for the party.

As someone who cares deeply for the environment, I would go for an e-card. But for those who still like print-based outputs, you can’t go past a custom-designed birthday card.

Of course, you can make your own, or use a photo for Canva or print services at places like Officeworks or Kmart, but if you want to minimize the hassle or you can’t be bothered with the design and effort – try Zazzle for bike inspired birthday cards. (This is an Australian service, I’m sure there will be an equivalent if you are living elsewhere).

Zazzl e is a community of researchers, professional artists, manufacturing gurus, patent holders, inventors, musicians and more, who are united by a passion to re-define commerce. They apply technology, design and skills to help customers produce their own products and designs – it is pretty impressive.

As an example, I typed in ‘bicycle birthday invites’ into their search and HEAPS came up. You can use stock designs or create your own. The images below are from Zazzle and are just a few you can get from the initial search:

Bike Themed Party Food

Of course you are going to need some party themed bike food. The below list is more geared towards kids parties, but lets face it, kids party’s often have best snack food.

I’ve also included a few images of more adult, savory and ‘technical’ food (at least in construction) to offset the usual sugary-laden snack food and bike cake to follow.

Here are some bike party food suggestions from the Mighty Mom’s Club:

If you’re feeling ambitious, follow this lead and make chocolate gears as cupcake toppers.
Increase the bling and glitz things up with this gold cake topper.
Why not ditch the classic birthday cake for more portable cupcakes with a bicycle topper? If those are a bit over budget, here’s another adorable option.
This bicycle fruit tray is both healthy and a work of art.
Race your way to a piece of this delicious bundt cake complete with bike lanes and cake toppers.
These super-simple rainbow pinwheels will have all your riders refueling with glee.
Aren’t these chocolate and sprinkle covered pretzels adorable? Put them on display as “kickstands!”
The rules of the road apply to cyclists, too. Lighten up your table with these fruity traffic light skewers.
It’s always a bonus when there’s more than sugar, sugar, and more sugar at a birthday party. This wheels-and-cheese recipe is sure to please everyone especially when you serve it on these trendy plates.

Bike Birthday Cakes

A while ago I wrote about bike cakes (read about bike cakes here), so I will not go over it all again here.

But it does need to be said that bike-themed cakes are AWESOME!

Personally, I prefer home-made bike cakes to store-bought, just because of the diversity, personalisation and effort it takes to make it – but saying that, I won’t be turning down a slice from ANY creative bike cake on a riders birthday.

Bike cakes are only limited by your imagination, time, skill and finances.

In my book, the weirder and more fun the bike cake – the better!

Here are a few examples of bike cakes:

*Just as a side note – I am frustrated by how bike cakes are pretty much solely focused on male riders and perpetuate very traditional ‘masculine’ conventions/performatives in the theming, naming and decorating. One of the only female-rider bike cakes that did not have (all) pink, flowers, balloons, a step-through bike or something hyper-girly was a cake (first one below), from Dubai. More bike cakes that have female-riders who are equally portrayed as diverse, champions, fast, risk-takers, active and adventurous riders, please!

21/08/202022/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 4): ’The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination’

This is the fourth instalment of our August 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first looked at Ai Weiwei’s ‘Forever’, the second ‘Returnity’ by Elin Wikström and Anna Brag and the third was ‘Shedding Light’ from Tutti Arts Oz Asia Festival. Here we look at how the UK’s activist organisation ‘The Lab‘ use bicycles to assert creative civil disobedience to subvert dominant power structures. Enjoy! NG.

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination: Bike Bloc (2009)

Also using public space creatively, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination in the UK have mobilised bicycles to serve quite different ends.

The Lab is an activist organisation that has devised inventive forms of creative civil disobedience to assert an alternative to the nexus of capitalism, consumption and environmental destruction.

They try “to open spaces where the imaginative poetic spirit of art meets the courage and rebelliousness inherent to activism”.

In 2009, the Lab developed the Bike Bloc as a form of direct action for the UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen (the unsuccessful forerunner to the recent Paris Climate Talks).

Hundreds of people worked over several weeks to design and weld activist bicycles and practise “street action cycle choreography”.

Double Double Trouble – a Dissent Bicycle-Object

Some of these were paired tall-bikes that gave riders a great height advantage (confiscated by police before the protest), while others were equipped with megaphones that played music, sirens and abstract sounds in synchronicity.

One such bike recently featured in Disobedient Objects, an exhibition developed by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London which toured to the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.

As the video documentation shows, the Lab embraced the model of an insect swarm in order to create a dispersed field of sound and activity that drew police attention in different directions.

What makes this action so compelling artistically is the intersection of DIY cycle culture and the lessons of radical theatre and performance.

The bicycle was assessed for what kind of form it might contribute to coordinated protest, notably creating a fluid field of assembling and disassembling bodies and sound.

Laura Fisher is a post-doctoral research fellow at Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. In October 2015 she co-curated Bespoke City with Sabrina Sokalik at UNSW Art & Design, a one night exhibition featuring over 20 practitioners celebrating the bicycle through interactive installations, sculpture, video, design innovation, fashion and craft. This event was part of Veloscape, an ongoing art–research project exploring the emotional and sensory dimensions of cycling in Sydney.

The contents of this post was written by Laura Fisher and first published online by Artlink (2015). Minor edits and hyperlinks added and footnotes removed to aid short-form continuity. Images from Makery unless attributed.

17/08/202022/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 3): Oz Asia Festival ‘Shedding Light’

In this post, we continue our August 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first post looked at Ai Weiwei’s most iconic bicycle-based artworks ‘Forever’ and the second detailed the ‘reversed engineered’ bike project ‘Returnity’ by German art duo Elin Wikström and Anna Brag. Here we look at the incredible collaborative illuminated bike-light-culture- performance ‘Shedding Light’ from Tutti Arts Oz Asia Festival 2015. Enjoy! NG.

Dissident Bicycles (Part 3): 'Shedding Light' Oz Asia Festival. Bicycles Create Change.com 17th August 2020.

Shedding Light – Tutti Arts & Oz Asia Festival (2015)

We left off the previous post on the ‘reversed engineered’ bike project ‘Returnity’ by German art duo Elin Wikström and Anna Brag, with the idea that experimentation can be used to engage cory and mind in such a way as to galvanise both personal autonomy and social affinity.

This was further demonstrated by the Shedding Light project that featured in the 2015 OzAsia Festival in Adelaide.

Shedding Light was a two-year collaboration between Tutti Arts, a multi-arts organisation for artists with a disability in Adelaide, and Perspectif, a sister organisation in Yogyakarta 2013.

Among the many mediums through which the artists explored the Indonesia–Australia relationship were creatively constructed carts inspired by the Indonesian kaki lima (street vendor carts), and vehicles inspired by Sepeda Lampus, the four-wheeled pedal cars augmented with neon lights and sound systems hired out at the Sultan’s Palace square in Yogyakarta.

This part of Shedding Light was realised in collaboration with James Dodd, an artist who has long engaged in bicycle modification as part of a practice concerned with informal and incidental forms of public creativity.

Dodd fabricated the pedal cars using two bicycles so that they could accommodate a Tutti artist, a support companion and a passenger.

The neon light frames were modelled upon designs created by three Tutti artists: a unicorn (William Gregory), a shark (Joel Hartgen) and a three-headed snowman (James Kurtze).

Over several nights, passengers would be taken a short distance around the Adelaide Festival Centre Plaza to a special location where a short performance by another Tutti artist was staged for them.

Like Returnity (see our previous post Part 2) , Shedding Light involved modifying bicycles to facilitate a creative social intervention, in this case tied to the aim of enhancing the visibility of Tutti artists.

As Dodd relates, what made the project so rewarding and unusual was that it created intimate encounters between festival audiences and the Tutti artists out in the streets, far from the organised formality of ticketed events.

13/08/202013/10/2020

Dissident Bicycles (Part 2): Brag & Wikström’s ‘Retunity’

This August, we have a 5-part series written by Laura Fisher exploring how bicycles are used as a dissident object in contemporary art. The first post looked at the importance and impact of one of Ai Weiwei’s most iconic bicycle-based artworks ‘Forever’. In this second instalment, Laura looks at the refashioned (literally) ‘reversed engineered’ bike project entitled Returnity by German art duo Elin Wikström and Anna Brag. Enjoy! NG.

Dissident Bicycles (Part 2): Brag & Wikstrom's 'Retunity'. Bicycles Create Change.com 13th August 2020.

While Ai’s bicycles are polished and quiescent, many other artists have employed the bicycle’s movement to activate different kinds of individual and social behaviour. For example, in 1997, as part of the Skulptur Projecte in Münster, Germany, artists Elin Wikström and Anna Brag staged an event called Returnity.

They engineered nine bicycles to travel backwards when they were pedalled forwards, and equipped them with training wheels and a rear-view mirror.

A bicycle club was set up in a public park for three months, providing instructions to members of the public who attempted to ride the altered bicycles. In the end, over 2,000 people participated with about a quarter of these returning again and again to improve their skills.

These bicycles were a prop for heightening people’s spatial and sensory awareness. They also created an unusual social space. As Maria Lind remarked, it “was a playful test that referenced lifelong learning [and] connectivity in a globalised world” and an exercise in “radically rethinking and deliberately disorienting one’s naturalised behaviours”

Lind’s comments about Returnity are a reminder that the bicycle’s humility as a human scaled machine paradoxically gives it great power. Not only is it open to inexhaustible experimentation, it can engage the body and mind in such a way as to galvanise both personal autonomy and social affinity.

18/06/202031/07/2020

Two 90-year-old WWII veterans cycle 167kms to commemorate D-Day

Another epic cycling story! If you were impressed fifteen-year-old Jyoti Kumari’s 1, 200kms bike ride to get her disabled father home, here is another inspirational epic ride. This story is about two 90-year-old WWII friends who are undertaking a commemorative stationary cycle challenge. After seeing this story, I will never accept “I’m too old” as an excuse not to cycle again. Wow!! Most people don’t ride 167kms, left alone in their mid-90s. There is hope for us all. What a way to commemorate a significant part of your life – AND raise money to help others in need. Enjoy. NG.

Two 90-year old WWII veterans are undertaking a 167 km (104 mile) charity cycle to commemorate the 76^th anniversary of D-Day.

The two friends, Len Gibbon (96) and Peter Hawkins (95) are both Normandy veterans.

The distance was chosen because it is the same distance that Len Gibbon’s took as a solider to get from his home in Portsmouth to the front in Normandy in 1944.

Using stationary bike they aimed to cover the distance from Portsmouth to Gold Beach by D-Day on June 6^th.

Both men are in wheelchairs, but this has not stopped them. To do the cycle challenge, they are using stationary bikes so they can still be comfortably seated while cycling.

Len Gibbon (96) started his cycle on VE day and has been riding every day since.

Already, they have raised over US$8, 500 for the charity Just Giving.

Mr Hawkins landed at Gold Beach a few days after Mr Gibbon in 1944 and was awarded a belated Legion d’Honneur for “recognition of military service for the liberation of France”.

Mr Gibbon said: “Although I’m 96, I still like to be active and take on new challenges. By cycling the same distance as the journey I took 76 years ago, it feels like a fitting tribute to those who were part of the Normandy landings.

The Normandy landings were like nothing else. You had to climb down this rope netting which hung down the side of the boat. Then when we got down to a certain point, someone shouted ‘Jump!’ and you had to fall backwards, someone caught you and pushed you on to the smaller landing craft to take you to shore.”

Originally from Elephant and Castle in London, Mr Gibbon joined the Royal Army Service Corps as a despatch rider when he was 20 years old.

In early June 1944, he got married and four days later he was posted to Normandy.

At Care for Veterans where he lives, physiotherapists have been working with Mr Gibbon on his balance and endurance.

His leg strength and overall fitness have improved with physiotherapy and he can now walk around safely with a mobility frame and supervision.

Taking part in this challenge would not have been possible without the physiotherapy.

Gibbons added: “Raising money for Care for Veterans means we can continue to help others who need support in later life.

I’m a keen dancer and am still able to have a dance with the other residents which keeps me young. I love to do the Cha Cha.”

Mr Gibbon was in Normandy through to the end of the invasion, then went to the Netherlands via Brussels, and was part of Operation Market Garden in September of 1944.

From there, he was posted in Germany, which is where he was when the war ended.

He recalled: “I was on my way to Hamburg, riding my motorbike along the autobahn by myself.

Suddenly a Spitfire was flying above me, came right down as if it was going to land on the road, then flew back up and did a loop. The pilot shouted down to me with thumbs up, shouting ‘victory!’

Then I knew it was over. I stood up on my bike, arms in the air, cheering.”

*Some content and images sourced from News Chain, Belfast Telegraph, CGTN and The Daily Mail.

03/06/202017/07/2020

World Bicycle Day 2020

For the last 5 years, this blog has celebrated the positive impacts bicycles have on people, places, communities and the environment.

Last year, I celebrated World Bicycle Day by going for a ride, attending the Mabo Oration and meeting Assoc. Prof. Chelsea Bond. The year before that, 2018, was the inaugural World Bicycle Day – it’s first time ever so I had an extra post looking at how it all came about. For 2020, we’ll look at the UN’s perspective of how WBD 2020 contributes to improving global health.

World Bicycle Day 2020. Bicycles Create Change.com 3rd June 2020. — Happy World Bicycle Day 2020! Image: Tantaran.com

Happy World Bicycle Day 2020!

I hope you had a great time out and about on two wheels!

To see photos and stories from how others spent World Bicycle Day 2020 – check out #WorldBicycleDay and #JustRide

People celebrate World Bicycle Day in many ways. Some people do it on bikes, others do it for bikes. It was a delight to see the myriad ways people honoured the humble bike – riding with friends, making art, sharing music, having critical conversations, holding events and all kinds of advocating for more positive bike change.

One example was MP Jim McMahon (Oldham, UK) who wrote a letter to Oldham Council encouraging them to look towards off-road routes for future cycling and walking infrastructure projects in his local area.

The UN Perspective of World Bicycle Day

For the UN, World Bicycle Day is:

To acknowledge the uniqueness, longevity and versatility of the bicycle, which has been in use for two centuries, and that it is a simple, affordable, reliable, clean and environmentally fit sustainable means of transportation, fostering environmental stewardship and health

In large part, this is in response to the fact that, internationally, the mobility needs of people who walk and cycle – often the majority of citizens in a city – continue to be overlooked. The UN Share the Road Programme Annual Report 2018, shows that the benefits of investing in pedestrians and cyclists can save lives, help protect the environment and support poverty reduction.

Walking and cycling continues to be a critical part of the mobility solution for helping cities de-couple population growth from increased emissions, and to improve air quality and road safety.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), safe infrastructure for walking and cycling is also a pathway for achieving greater health equity.

For the poorest urban sector, who often cannot afford private vehicles, walking and cycling can provide a form of transport while reducing the risk of heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, diabetes, and even death.

That means bikes are not only healthy, they are also equitable and cost-effective. There are many reasons to love bikes, for example…

Bikes are a simple, reliable, clean and environmentally sustainable means of transportation
Bikes can serve as a tool for development and as a means not just of transportation but also of access to education, health care and sport
The synergy between the bicycle and the user fosters creativity and social engagement and gives the user an immediate awareness of the local environment
The bicycle is a symbol of sustainable transportation and conveys a positive message to foster sustainable consumption and production, and has a positive impact on climate

Internationally, the aim of World Bicycle Day is to:

Encourage specific bicycle development strategies at the international, regional, national and subnational level via policies and programmes
Improve road safety, sustainable mobility, and transport infrastructure planning and design
Improve cycling mobility for broader health outcomes (ie preventing injuries and non-communicable diseases)
Progress use of the bicycle as a means of fostering sustainable development
Strengthening bike and physical education, social inclusion and a culture of peace
Adopt best practices and means to promote the bicycle among all members of society

Regardless of the reason you ride bikes – you are in very good company!

Keep riding, be healthy and have a awesome World Bicycle Day today!

Parts of this content is taken/edited from the UN World Bicycle Day official website.

06/03/202015/04/2020

Social Science Research in COVID-19

Hello, bike nuts! Thanks for dropping in. As you have noticed, it has been incredibly hectic since my return from Sierra Leone. Not only has it been a profound shift returning from my PhD fieldwork and all the emotions, work, people and activity that entailed, but COVID-19 has taken complete hold of the world to which I returned. Just like everyone else, for the last month, all my time and energy has been consumed with transferring to remote work. For me, that means all managing and adapting all my teaching, learning and classes to virtual spaces – as well as supporting my international and domestic students (116 in all) do the same. The COVID-shift, as I have come to call this phase, has taken precedence over updating this blog. Rest assured, I will be updating as I get the chance, but it might not be as regular as we are used to – but I will continue uploading content – after all, it seems more critical now more than ever to celebrate life and keep positive (on and off the bike!). NG.

Social Science Research in COVID-19

It’s a crazy time to be a (social) scientist – and an even crazier time for fieldwork.

In addition to my own direct experience of recently travelling and researching overseas, I have returned to a world that has significantly changed since I left.

COVID-19 was a threat as I left for my fieldwork in Africa – and it was a reality when I returned.

Everyone has had to make sacrifices, changes and adjustments for family, work and research.

These adjustments take weeks if not months and there is no avoiding it – but as Victor Frankl reminds us, we do have control over how we chose to face challenges.

I have been heartened to see some academic proactively moving to meet the challenge of researching during COVID-19.

For those researchers who need a little lift and motivation – this post is for you.

Here are 3 ways social scientists are productively responding to COVID-19.

1. Alisha Ahmed

I found the advice given by academic Aisha Ahmed (who has experience living and working during war, poverty and disasters) on ‘Why you should ignore all that Corona-inspired productivity pressure’ was not only timely but it also provided some solace.

2. Deborah Lupton

Deborah Lupton This Sociological Life has posted some resources for social researchers working in a COVID society saying ‘I’ve put together a few open-access resources concerning what an initial agenda for COVID-related social research could be and research methods for conducting fieldwork in the COVID world’. Her post includes the links below:

Conducting Fieldwork in a Pandemic (Google Doc crowd-sourced resource)
Social Research for a COVID and post-COVID World: An Initial Agenda (blog post)
Conducting Qualitative Fieldwork During COVID-19 (PowerPoint slides) (Webinar presentation with voice and slides)

3. The COVID-19 Social Science Research Tracker

This is an open-source global spreadsheet that collates COVID-19 research projects. This impressive repository includes large and small projects from some of the leading universities in the world and showcases the range and significance of COVID-19 impact. All hail GitHub! The organisers state: ‘Social scientists have an important role during a pandemic. We can do this much better through cooperation. This international list tracks new research about COVID 19, including published findings, pre-prints, projects underway, and projects at least at proposal stage.’ What a gift.

COVID-19 and my PhD research

Once my transition to full remote working and teaching has ‘settled down’ (whatever the hell that means?!), I’ll be making space to sit down and reflect.

I’ll be taking stock and considering how and where I’ll incorporate this unique encounter into my academic work, my dissertation and beyond.

Best of luck to us all.

09/12/201901/01/2020

AARE – Australian Association of Research in Education 2019 Conference

The Australia Association for Research in Education (AARE) annual national conference was held in Brisbane this week.

I was supposed to be in Cape Town (South Africa) presenting at two conferences: The 2019 New Materialist Reconfigurations of Higher Education Conference (Dec 2-4th 2019)and then straight after that conference Pedagogies in the Wild – the 3^rd South African Deleuze & Guattari Conference on 4-6^th December.

But I withdrew due to rising safety concerns UWC was shut down following heated local protests against gender-based violence, rape and femicide during the recent World Economic Forum that continued to escalate.

What is AARE?

AARE is Australia’s premier network for educational researchers. A key aim for AARE is to inform and improve policy and practice in education – and share these insights with other interested parties.

AARE blog is where experts share opinions, raise questions and explore education themes and issues.
AARE has an impressive range of special interest groups (SIGs).
The annual conference is the most popular AARE offering. Each year, local educational professionals from Australia and around the world come together to network, share ideas and hear about the latest educational research, projects and approaches. Here are some keynote presentations from past conferences and some past papers.

AARE 2019 Conference

The theme for this conference was ‘Education for a Socially Just World.

The sessions on offer are extensive (dare I say overwhelming?).

The truncated program of abstract titles only alone is 274 pages – click here.

The complete program (full abstracts) is a whopping 1162 pages – click here.

So many great sessions to choose from – and some very big names.

As I am a researcher working with New Materialisms, I definitely wanted to go to and see independent (New Materialist) scholar Bronwyn Davies.

In order to save my sanity, time and effort I just decided to stick with seeing what the Post- Structural Theory SIG had on offer – and then go to any other sessions/speakers who caught my eye.

Here, in no particular order are some of my hot tips for AARE 2019 sessions:

Sarah Healy (Melbourne Uni), Alli Edwards (Monash Uni), Alicia Flynn (Melbourne Uni). Welcome to the Playtank! Re-_____ing research.
David Bright (Monash Uni). Qualitative inquiry and Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literature: In which I consider verisimilitude as a criterion for judging the quality of qualitative writing with reference made to Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5 albeit not really in the telegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planet Tralfamadore. (I went to this session and it was amazing! It ended up winning the Best Session Award 2019 for the whole conference – and rightly so!).
Parlo Singh (Griffith Uni) and Gabrielle Ivinson (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Radical Inclusion Research in/with Schools Serving High Poverty Communities.
Sarah E. Truman (Melbourne Uni), David Ben Shannon (Manchester Metropolitan Uni, UK). Queer textualities and temporalities: speculating-with Alpha Centauri.
Lucinda McKnight (Deakin Uni), Melissa Wolfe (Monash Uni) and Bronwyn Davies (Independent scholar). Is new materialism incompatible with social justice? Panel Discussion with Professor Bronwyn Davies.
Maria Ejlertsen (Griffith Uni). “I don’t fit in, I fit out”: Enabling more-than inclusive spaces for student belonging and engagement with school through attention to more-than-human entanglements of spacetimematter.

I went for the full three days and to as many sessions as I could (these were just a few).

I also went to the below session which was the first in a series of AARE Post-Structuralist SIG Event Series feat. Professor Bronwyn Davies funded by AARE Poststructural Theory SIG Major Grant 2019. See abstract below.

Exploring the poetics and the ethics of new materialist inquiry: Professor Bronwyn Davies

As researchers, our task is to get inside the processes of those materialisations of the world that we encounter (where encounter is not a collision but a mutual affecting and being affected); it is to find or generate the concepts that will enable us to see those encounters not in normative, already-known terms, but in ways that open up new possibilities for sensing and responding, for becoming sense-able and response-able. That is the ethics of new materialism.

And what of the poetics? New materialist research is necessarily playful. It crosses disciplinary boundaries, messing those boundaries up; it works with new and emergent philosophical concepts, bringing them to life through art, poetry, literature; it enters into the very specificity of sensual existence as it is caught in a moment of spacetime and simultaneously opens up, or finds its way into life itself. Through such explorations it seeks to break loose from old dogmas, old methods, old binaries—all the paraphernalia of a normalized set of thoughts and practices that place the individual human above and separate from the world, and that constrain research through the repetition of the already-known. It seeks to open up thought, giving space to emergence of new ways of understanding, new ways of becoming, throwing off the shackles of the clichéd conventions of rationality and order.

In the workshop following this paper, I will present one or more of my own explorations that begin with where I am, or slip right into the middle, and then reflect on what was involved in going there. What re-conceptualising was involved? What new practices? What ethics? What poetics? I will then open up that exploration with the audience, inviting them to shift from being audience to becoming participants, giving them an opportunity to talk and write about something that matters to them in their encounters with more-than-human relationality, that called/calls on their sense-ability and response-ability.

26/11/201929/11/2019

Pro cyclists overtaken by local farmer

Video: Youtube RM Videos

Sometimes after a busy week like the one I’ve just had, all I want is a quick happy bike story fix.

This week, I revisited Luis, the local Colombian farmer who effortlessly overtook a group of ‘pro’ road cyclists up a hill while they were attempting a world record.

It a simple story that many cyclists love.

Here’s what happened: Two road cyclists, Axel Carion (French) and Andres Fabricius (Swedish) were trying to break the current world record (58 days) to ride the whole length of South America (7,450 miles in total).

While in Antioquia (Colombia), they were struggling up a particularly steep hill, when local farmer Luis rode up behind them and then continued to sail past them on his old clunker wearing only a shirt and denim jeans.

The pro cyclists in full lycra and on high-end bikes couldn’t believe their eyes!

He gives them a friendly nod as he overtakes them and just keeps going about his business – GOLD!

Apparently, Luis rides 62 miles every day around his hilly surrounds – which explains why he is so fit and could so effortlessly overtake them.

Pro cyclists on the rivet overtaken by a local farmer. Bicycles Create Change.com 26th Nov 2019. — Image: The Daily Mail – CEN/Biking Man

I know it is a clique, but I still love the idea of a local on a clapped-out bike creaming professional cyclists all decked out in lycra on high-end bikes. It just makes me happy.

It totally speaks to my it-doesn’t-matter-who-you-are-just-get-on-a-bike-and-ride approach to biking.

It’s also a good reminder for all riders not to take themselves too seriously.

For all those Luis’s out there…. we need you!!

Keep being amazing and ride on!

This story was first published by The Daily Mail.