Cycling Cultures blog

I am participating in Copenhagen University’s upcoming PhD course in Cycling and Society in November-December this year. As part of the week’s events, current plans are for a ‘sociology day’ run by Dave Horton and I, involving presentations, fieldwork, and workshop discussions. I’m really looking forward to the event – and also hoping it will be a good chance for me to develop some of the ideas and activities that will form part of the new MSc course in Transport, Sustainability, and Society, which we’ll be running here at UEL in September 2012.

Also while I’m in Denmark, I’ll be participating in a couple of seminars run by C-MUS (the Centre for Mobility Studies) at Aalborg. Details of one of them here.

My exhibition at LMNH happily corresponded with the Great British Bunt Off. The results of which were left on display.

This was one of the comments we received at the Cambridge Cycling Campaign meeting this week. It was raised as something to be discussed and unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to do it justice in the context of talking about the broad and complex issues of UK cycling cultures. I thought I might do a bit more now.

Firstly, things that are obvious to some are not obvious to everyone. This is the essence of culture. We only have to travel to another town, not even to another country, to notice how cultural practices and norms change. Suddenly, we realise that the things that we think are ‘natural’, things that we take for granted are ours alone and different ways of living, different logics, exist in other places. These are the fundamentals of sociological research – attempting to understand the normative social and cultural structures that shape everyday life.

Obvious things are the first things we lose sight of. The norms and governing social rules by which we live our everyday lives tend to be mundane and boring. They become invisible. Drawing attention to these, rendering them visible, is one way of seeing them with fresh eyes and finding new ways of interrogating them – to understand where they have come from, how they are made and constantly sustained. A core tenet of ethnography, a particular qualitative research method, is to see the world through the eyes of participants. The researcher gains a nuanced understanding by immersing herself in the social, cultural and physical worlds of a particular group. It involves constantly comparing the unfamiliar with the familiar in an attempt to generate ‘a self-conscious awareness of what is learned, how it has been learned, and the social transactions that informed the production of such knowledge’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 1996:101).

Obvious things are not fixed or static. We are flexible emotional beings living in complex human and non-human networks. Our meanings and understandings of the world are made and re-made on a daily basis. We produce meaning in our actions, interactions and language in and around the things around us. These change. We change. Looking closely at these things enables us to see what operates as catalysts to facilitate these changes. I am currently doing archival cycling research and reading ‘obvious’ things from the 1890s which brings to light the extraordinary fight women had in challenging the social, political and physical constraints of Victorian society to ride safety bicycles, wear bifurcated skirts and rise up against the abuse hurled at them in the streets.

Obvious things are not boring. Susan Leigh Star, one of my favourite writers, has done much to advocate the study of ‘boring’ things. She focuses on infrastructures, arguing that they are often overlooked because they are considered ‘singularly unexciting’ (1999:377). Partially this is because they have taken the mode of pipes supplying water or sewerage or cables that channel electricity and phone data, which means they are either hidden in the landscape and architecture of the home or have become so ubiquitous they are rendered invisible. She argues that it is only through a study of the unstudied, the things we take for granted, that we can hope to see new and previously neglected connections and meanings. Although we are fully aware of how these infrastructures furnish essential services we are also content to ignore them until such times as they fail or breakdown. This approach attends to the idea that seemingly unremarkable artefacts and systems make explicit the familiar and taken-for-granted ways in which people make sense of and operate in everyday life.

Ultimately, if we are doing our job well then the people in our research should recognise themselves and see the ‘obvious’ in our results. Yet, to others outside this field of research our findings should be much less obvious, more surprising and potentially interruptive.

The Private View Bike Ride started at Two Wheels Good on a gorgeous sunny day with 25 people turning up on an amazing range of bicycles. The peloton featured cargo bikes, a recumbent, penny farthing, tallbike, fixed gear, flying gate, paper bicycle, tourers, hybrids and racers. Bike sized bunting affixed to stewards bikes added to the colour.

The motley peloton set off along Stoke Newington Church Street and down Albion Road to PUSH Cycles where we stopped to view four portraits. For some riders it provided a good opportunity to bike shop.

Back on our bikes we headed east, across Kingsland Road, along Sandringham Road and down to Wilton Way until we arrived at London Fields Cycles on Mare Street.

At London Fields Cycles we had snacks (muesli bars, juice and water) while looking at the eight photos on display.

We cycled on through London Fields, around Broadway Market (which was heaving with people and stalls) and over Regent’s Canal to Lock 7 where we viewed seven portraits.

Four down, one to go. We headed into town along Hackney Road and Columbia Road crossing over Kingsland Road and running parallel to Old Street until we reached Look Mum No Hands.

We arrived at Look Mum No Hands to find half the cafe reserved for us, twelve portraits to look at and enough cake to satisfy even the hungriest cyclist. Thankfully more people joined us at the cafe to help.

We stayed at Look Mum No Hands until we had at least dented the cake mountain, we played on different bikes in nearby side streets, told stories and drank beer into the early evening.

The purpose of the ride was to showcase the portraits, and the point of the exhibition was to represent the rich and diverse cultures of cycling in Hackney today. The event provided lots of opportunities to network, talk about the broader research project and engage people who otherwise might not get to see the work that we are doing and contribute. Thankyou to everyone for participating in the research and coming along for the ride.

Many thanks also goes to UEL’s Creative Community Development fund for supporting the event.

Britt took lots of great footage of the ride and the film will be posted here soon.