Cycling and social complexity: An ethnography of (bi)cycle travel and urban transformations

As policy makers grapple with rapid urbanization and motorization processes, human-scale transportation modes such as cycling are gaining new urgency, offering non-polluting alternatives to automobility. At the same time, urban planning paradigms tend to focus on purely technical solutions to transportation challenges, leaving questions of history, culture and social power aside. This dissertation contributes to a small but growing field of situated research investigating the role of socio-cultural life in fostering and inhibiting cycling practices as well as the wider potential of (bi)cycle histories in revealing the workings of power across urbanizing landscapes. Based on archival and ethnographic fieldwork from the Mexican bajío, it argues that while the bicycle may appear as a simple tool for promoting urban wellbeing and environmental sustainability, cycling practices nevertheless have layers of meaning, historical complexity, invisible work and affective significance and that are not always self-evident. These complexities are not only significant on a historiographical level, but they also have implications in terms of how cycling is mobilized in new urban-planning agendas, the possibilities and limitations of cycling infrastructure in different contexts as well as whose voices are included and excluded from these discussions. Emphasizing the heterogeneity of (bi)cycling, this dissertation aims to reframe cycling research with greater attention to social complexity, advancing critical theories in feminist science and technology studies, mobility justice as well as Latin American theorizing on ways of knowing otherwise. Rather than simply reflecting on cycling politics, this dissertation mobilizes bicycle and tricycle trajectories as an opening for considering a variety of complex challenges relating to the past, present and future of cities. Not only do cycling pathways lead us through diverse transportation histories, they can also reveal the need for attention to the ways that social inequities traverse broad regimes of (im)mobility and particular contours of resistance; an understanding of the processes through which social groups contest mobility injustices and formulate alternatives for building inclusive cities; as well as an appreciation of participatory, gender-transformative and insurgent approaches to urban design

From seeds to syndicates: explorations in collective actions for food sovereignty and resiliency in Guatemala

In the face of rising environmental and food insecurities, communities across the globe are increasingly organizing to regain control of agro-ecological systems. This thesis explores these struggles in the context of highland Guatemala, examining food/seed sovereignty and permaculture movements and the lived experiences of rural women, farmers and grassroots environmental collectives. First, this thesis explores the historical erosion of local seed sovereignty, women’s current roles in the food sovereignty movement and the gendered implications of both of these processes. Second, this thesis explores how grassroots collectives are drawing from permaculture’s principles to creatively address agricultural and environmental vulnerabilities through horizontal organizational frameworks. This thesis posits that the food sovereignty and permaculture movements not only offer promising approaches for agricultural production and environmental stewardship, but they also provide valuable insights into the process of promoting local self-determination, democratization, gender equality and resiliency within and beyond local movements

An agenda for creative practice in the new mobilities paradigm

Creative practices have made a standing contribution to mobilities research. We write this article as a collective of 25 scholars and practitioners to make a provocation: to further position creative mobilities research as a fundamental contribution and component in this field. The article explores how creative forms of research—whether in the form of artworks, exhibitions, performances, collaborations, and more—has been a foundational part of shaping the new mobilities paradigm, and continues to influence its methodological, epistemological, and ontological concerns. We tour through the interwoven history of art and mobilities research, outlining five central contributions that creativity brings. Through short vignettes of each author’s creative practice, we discuss how creativity has been key to the evolution and emergence of how mobilities research has expanded to global audiences of scholars, practitioners, and communities. The article concludes by highlighting the potency of the arts for lively and transdisciplinary pathways for future mobilities research in the uncertainties that lay ahead