Cycling in a global world: Introduction to the special section

During their transnational circulation, bicycles became glocalized as local users tailored them to fit local laws, customs, user preferences and cultures. Bicycles thus acquired many different local meanings as users incorporated them into daily lifes and practices in diverse global settings. To show the importance of 'normalized use', i.e. rural bicycle use, in which cycling became enduring, sustainable, new, old and new again, we need globally grounded histories of mobility

Why Masculine Technologies Matter

In contrast to McGaw's non-obvious technologies and female perspective, making the invisible visible, Ruth Oldenziel begins with a very visible kind of technology: the automobile. She argues, however, that the fondness of boys for cars and the nature of male technophilia in the twentieth century are anything but obvious, that boys learn to love their toys with the help of auto manufacturers and others who have mobilized extensive economic and cultural resources in the interests of shaping what is partly a consumer relationship. Like McGaw, Oldenziel insists that we do not assume boys should like machines any more than girls should like putting things away in cupboards, cabinets, and closets. In what ways has technological knowledge been transmitted and nurtured? How does Oldenziel treat the gendered associations of production and consumption categories in an age when consumers were increasingly being coded female