Regular readers of this blog know that I am doing a bike-focused PhD in Education. In a nutshell, my project explores how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education.
It is a great project and I love working on it.
I’ve been developing a research methodology called velo-onto-epistemology (VOE) as part of this project. I know it is a mouthful, but the article explains what it means.
I am delighted to share my latest publication which introduces my novel bicycle-focused research approach for the first time.
I wrote this paper with my incredible supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon. In this paper, I take Sherilyn for a bike ride as a way to put to work my VOE research methodology and destablise the traditional power hierarchy of the PhD candidate-supervisor relationship.
To show how velo-relationality works differently, we juxtapose – or ‘recycle’ our experiences next to each other (see below) in what we call ‘tandem writing’.
This article is an engaging read.
It is theoretical enough to be rigorous and interesting, but relatable for the everyday reader-rider.
Below is the abstract and a copy of the paper.
Feel free to download a copy (third icon on right below).
Check it out!
Ride on!
Enjoy!
ABSTRACT
Traditionally, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is predicated on a supervisor as teacher/expert – candidate as learner/novice model. But what becomes possible when the materialities of this power dynamic are destabilised and reimagined? This article draws from emerging feminist ontologies to introduce the concept of velo- onto-epistemology [VOE] as a means of re-cycling candidate- supervisor-relationships. VOE acknowledges the agency of the bicycle in moving and being moved. This novel approach is used to explore how stor(i)ed encounters and in-the-moment bodily responses enact current-future becomings. Through re-cycling, the candidate-supervisor-relationship is dis-articulated and re- articulated in ways that enable alternative and more equitable understandings of the world to emerge.