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.
Dear Reader. If this is your first time on this blog – it is best not to start with the post below. This post is a disruptive edit expert-iment that begins ‘in the middle’. It will not make much sense if you’ve not seen some of my previous posts. Some of these posts (like the Geography and Collective Memories post – which you should check out) are getting increasingly ‘loose’ and ‘messy’ and working with ‘in-progress’ sensemaking – thus leading into more disruptive edits like this one. If you are new, perhaps start with the ‘clean and tidy’ version of this post – it is called Mother’s Day 2021 and is the precursor-basis for the exploration below.
If you are up for something different, read on!
*NB: this post is best read on a desktop – might be a little (more) odd if on a mobile device*
This post is not what it seems…well…. it is… and it isn’t.
What started out as a ‘normal’ post morphed into something else. Usually, blog posts are straightforward: informative, factual, opinion, or instructional. While I was writing on the topic ‘Mothers Day’ for this post – disruptive ideas and opportunities emerged. So… instead of ignoring or disregarding them, I embraced them. You could say this was also an experiment in applying diffraction thinking-doing (my theoretical approach I am using for my PhD) to other-than academic writing. This is new territory for me (to write) and for you (to read). What diffraction writing means here, is that instead of only sharing the usual polished final blog post, I’ve experimented with folded into the blog post my thinking-process-editing as I am writing it – a kind of disruptive writing-with blog post process. It might be a little weird and may or may not work. there will be typos and mistakes – some parts will just be notes or ‘snaps’ – resist the urge to edit for ‘correctness’. But I like the idea of doing something new and challenging what I think writing, especially such public writing! is or should be, going ‘beyond’, and being (more publicly) transparent with writing-as-process expert-iments. To try and show how this is working, the blog post content is in black text and the process content is in superscript like this. It would be easier to do this in a word document with track change comments which I have included below as a file for those interested in seeing it, but the here challenge is to see how it works within the functionality of a Word Press.org blog post.
Insert image of mum. Use creative commons to support alt artists. Attribute/link to promote photographer – preferably female. Use an image of other-than mainstream blond mum stereotype (in this case a redhead!) = have some sort of diversity to show a greater range of mums (blond mums already have a strong presence and representation online). See ‘undisrupted’ version of this post for alt (M)othering image
Mother’s Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents
8th May is Mother’s Day.
Happy Mother’s Day mums – and dads and significant others and carers who also fill maternal roles. Dads and other/carers: I added this is it did not feel right to only single out ‘mums’ as there are many ‘others’ who are not officially a’ mother’ – yet who equally fulfil a similar role. A homage to my commitment to better recognizing the fluid and diverse experiences of what ‘mothering’ is – and I was raised by my father who was a consummate ‘mother’ and father and many other things…
For a previous Mother’s Day, I wrote about the issues I had with some Mother’s Day ‘suggested gifts for cycling mums’.
If you haven’t read my post Happy Fearful Mother’s Day Cycling Mums! check it out here – it’s well worth the read!Internal Hyperlink: I link back to my own blog to promote past writing and keep readership ‘inside’ my website where – also helped remind me of the amount of work I have already done and share from the archives … I LOVE the image I sourced for this hyperlinked post
I appreciate the sentiment of Mother’s Day (and Father’s Day) in taking time to recognise and celebrate the input and work mums do. I didn’t want this post to be ‘too negative’ or ‘down with Mum’s day’ – that’s not what I think or mean – I wanted some balance and make sure I acknowledge the positives of Mother’s Day.
I like to think that mums are always appreciated as they are on Mother’s Day (ie for the other 364 days of the year as well) – not just one day a year … anyhoo…
Mums have it especially? tough.
Women are advantaged in society and mothers in particular face enduring and unfair social and corporate pressures and constraints around childcare, unpaid labour, taking the load for emotional labour (the unpaid job men still don’t understand) and ‘being a good mother’, inequitable divisions of household labour, the hidden and overlooked value-cost-effort of stay-at-home mums and that working mums (well…all women) on average make only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Christine Carter articulates these frustrations well in her piece: All I want for Mother’s Day is an equitable division of labour. Wanted to synthesis some facts into the post AND source more widely (ie not only read academic lit) AND get some mums voices in here. I’m hyperconscious that I’m not a mother, so am only presenting my POV on gender issues – not commenting on what it is like to BE a mum as that is not my direct, personal lived experience so I don’t feel comfortable commenting on that – so I made a point to look for mums who have written on this topic and found this great article on emotional labor. It fit in beautifully. So funny – I had a conversation with a dear friend on this very topic…I think I’ll flip her this link as well! And yes… it is ‘a thing’…still!
With much work needed to address these systemic gender inequities, Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognise these issues and celebrate mums and other female carers.
Traditionally, this means breakfast in bed, flowers, or lunches out with loved ones. link back here to ‘presents’ and conventional Mother’s Day approaches to lead into my final takeaway idea/content.
For cycling mums, it’s an opportunity to think more thoughtfully about the cycling presence and presents we give to mums and what these ‘gifts’ communicate, expect and perpetuate.
As I was writing this post, I’ve changed the title a few times. The changes reflect the different ‘moves’ I went through in writing the content – so in the spirit of transparent disruption – I am including that process here as well. It was at this stage of writing the post that I looked a the title and thought: ‘that title doesn’t fit anymore. The following section is a brief behind the scene thinking-editing-doing that went on at this stage. For reading ease I have not super-scripted this section despite it all being thinking-writing-as-process content.
I like the image above. It presents a not blond, white mum(gender?) House is a little messy and not presenting a ‘perfectly’ curated photo/family and the black LHS is suggestive of the ‘dark side’ of family life – fits well with overall post themes. It also helps break up blog content and helps separate the next section which is a new and different idea/focus.
Title: re-writing and re-righting
Initially the title was: Mother’s Day –more thoughtful presents, please!
It was tight and communicated the initial content main ideas. But it only named the ‘presents’ aspect, which was a very minor idea and didn’t fully capture the relational, non-commercial call to action I was putting forward.
So the next edit was: Mother’s Day –more thoughtful presents and presence, please!
I liked the homonym and alliteration of presents and presence – it fitted well with what I wanted to highlight. I looked at the order of the two keywords ‘presents’ and ‘presence’ and wonder how changing their placement might change the impact of the meaning of my overall message. I swapped them around to see that changed. I wanted to start with the known (presents) and end/lead into the blog main idea (presence) – so that was the final word order I chose.
Then: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presence and presents, please!
So I removed the: , please. It is a stronger statement – declarative and instructional, not a request and thus leaving open the final decision as to whether to act on this ‘request’ or not to other-than-the-mother-saying it .
Note to self: remove (more): , please(s).
Apply liberally – in general and elsewhere.
So then it was: Mother’s Day – more thoughtful presence and presents!
This was closer to the sentiment I wanted to convey. It is short and punchy and fits into (no more than) two lines of text as a heading – which is a good ‘grab’ for the WordPress RHS margin widget ‘Recent Posts’. The exclamation mark as an end made it read more of an imperative – but perhaps a little shouty – so I removed it. But then it was left hanging. I also wanted to give some notice as to the type of presentation/format this also helps with search features later on So I added: (Disruptive Edit) at the end. I added ‘Give’ at the start as I wanted to include mention of the action that was the crux of the post giving is a nice thing to do! I wanted the title to include someone doing something – and it read-felt much better with ‘give’. Then I stopped. gotta know when to stop! send it out now – share your process work, resist being ‘correct’ ‘right’ and ‘good’ just get it out there – it is in-process and raw so no more tinkering!
Final title: Mother’s Day: Give more thoughtful presence and presents (Disruptive Edit)
..then finish the blog content and close on a positive!
Interesting to note that WordPress backend drafting notifications (like the readability analysis, SEO, suggested ‘revisions’) are going crazy pining me to check and recheck. I have a list of sad red face emojis letting me know NEEDS IMPROVEMENT! – its the algorithm reminding me that this type of post ‘won’t work’ and is ‘not normal’ writing and formatting. I am ingoring them all.
(*PHEW*)
…and that dear reader is a little sneak-peak into some of the in-process ideas, considerations and edits that happen during the construction of blog posts!
Thanks for coming a long for this experimental ride into a disruptive edit!
ICQI 2021: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry
ICQI…..you know….only the largest ……. and most respected qualitative research conference IN THE WORLD! … and with all the biggest names!
My PhD supervisor said I should consider submitting an abstract for this conference.
Doing so is a VERY BIG DEAL – this congress is the pinnacle in my field. I’ve never presented at this conference.
For the first time ever, the ICQI 2021 will be held online. This is a super attractive feature for me as it will mean if I get an abstract accepted to present, I wouldn’t have to spend the extra money to travel to the USA as was required for all previous (and probably subsequent) ICQIs. If I ever wanted to give ICQI a solid shot – this is it!
So I did – and my abstract got accepted! Woohoo!
My ICQI 2021 Abstract
Velo-onto-epistemology: Becoming(s)-with Bicycles, Gender, Education and Research. This paper traces some experimental and experiential wonderings of researching gendered journeys on bicycles in West Africa. This session shares what is unfolding for one rider-researcher as she works to excavate the entanglements, tensions and possibilities of becoming(s)-with post-qualitative inquiry that foregrounds African landscapes, smells, desires, dynamics, beliefs, practices and peoples with emerging feminist posthuman ontologies. My research puts to work feminist New Materialisms to explore how bicycles feature in West African girls’ access to secondary education. This undertaking is bold, complex and unsettling. It requires (re)turning (Barad, 2006) and challenging habitual preoccupations about bicycles, embodiment, movement, identity, ecology, sp/pl/p/ace and methodology. There is much about gendered bodies navigating trails that commands attention, yet defies explanation (McLure, 2013). Drawing on key encounters experienced in Brisbane (Australia) and Lunsar (Sierra Leone), I trace the skills, wills, spills and thrills from which a velo-onto-epistemology is emerging.
The 2021 Congress theme is: Collaborative Futures in Qualitative Inquiry.
The rapidly changing social, cultural, political, economic, and technological dynamics brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic are inescapable as we endeavor to move forward. The pandemic has also amplified hard truths about everyday life: the ongoing historical devaluation of teachers, nurses, and service workers, and the precarity of the working classes, the unyielding privileging of business and the free market as the answer to all social and health ills, the differential experience of the virus relative to race, class, and gender dynamics, including as related to co-morbidity and mortality rates, access to care, and visibility, the rise of right-wing populism and its deleterious impact on positive governmental responses to pandemic conditions, the prominence of conspiracy theories in mainstream and social media discourse (e.g., masks don’t help, virus is man-made, etc.).
At the same time, we cannot overlook the broader context in which the 2021 Congress will take place: Black Lives Matter, #MeToo creeping authoritarianism, environmental crises, economic shocks to higher education and continuing public health crises.
Collectively and collaboratively, this moment calls for a critical, performative, social justice inquiry directed at the multiple crises of our historical present.
We need a rethinking of where we have been, and, critically, where we are going.
We cannot go at it alone.
We need to imagine new ways to collaborate, to engage in research and activism. New ways of representing and intervening into the historical present. New ways to conduct research, and a rethinking of in whose interest our research benefits.
Sessions in the 2021 Congress will take up these topics, as well as those related to and/or utilizing:
feminist inquiry
Critical Race Theory
intersectionality
queer theory
critical disability research
phenomenology
Indigenous methodologies
postcolonial and decolonized knowing
poststructural engagements
diffraction and intra-action
digital methodologies
autoethnography
visual methodologies
thematic analysis
performance
art as research
critical participatory action research
multivocality
collaborative inquiry
………..and the politics of evidence.
Sessions will also discuss:
threats to shared governance
attacks on freedom of speech
public policy discourse
and research as resistance
Scholars come to the Congress to resist, to celebrate community, to experiment with traditional and new methodologies, with new technologies of representation.
Together we seek to develop guidelines and exemplars concerning advocacy, inquiry and social justice concerns. We share a commitment to change the world, to engage in ethical work that makes a positive difference.
As critical scholars, our task is to bring the past and the future into the present, allowing us to engage realistic utopian pedagogies of hope.
ICQI provides leadership to demonstrate the promise of qualitative inquiry as a form of democratic practice, to show how qualitative inquiry can be used to directly engage pressing social issues at the level of local, state, national and global communities.
The Congress sponsors the journal International Review of Qualitative Research (IRQR), three book series, and occasional publications based upon the more than 1,000 papers given at the conference each year. It the largest annual gathering of qualitative scholars in the world.
This time last year I was in Lunsar (Sierra Leone) undertaking my bikes-for-education fieldwork.
I often think of what I saw, felt, learnt, and experienced there.
The trip was exciting, profound and challenging.
I sift through my research journal and field notes, diving into them, drinking in the details of memories brought back to life in full technicolour.
So many significant moments that won’t make it into my thesis.
Moments like Mariama and the Addax Aunties singing me in.
Addax school distribution. Girl-student-new bike. Photo: Nina Ginsberg.
It is late afternoon and everyone is hot. We are in Addax and have just finished a long day delivering a school bike distribution program at the only high school for miles around. We are far from anywhere. It took a long, rutty, dusty trip squished between Kao (precariously pillion-perched behind me) and Ben upfront. I marveled as Ben cheerfully bounced the struggling moped over the dirt road to get us here, two at a time, earlier this morning. He made numerous trips shuttling all the staff members to the school collection point. I admire his skill and grace as he navigates the precarious transfer in such harsh conditions – hard work(er) indeed. It is so remote. There is no way to walk the distance or drive on this surface. Access is so limited. As I wait for the others, I think of the isolation and the implications of this walking-world for the women and girls who live here. Inconceivable. Humbling. Unsettling. I wonder what it’s like for school girls riding bikes here.
After a day at the school, Ben ferries us individually to a family a few kilometers away to gather, rest and await our return transport back to Lunsar. We will be here for a while. As the ‘guest’, I was the first of Ben’s deliveries, but on arrival I see Jak magically got here before me. I wave to him from the other side of the yard. I watched him do great work today, explaining in Kriol basic bike maintenance to the students. He was a superstar. He smiles and nods to me and accepts a drink of water as he collapses into a nearby plastic chair. Ben grins and tells me to wait here and rest: he is going back for the others. No problem I say. He takes off in a cloud of red dust. I look around me.
I see a young girl approaching me. It takes me a moment to realise she is one of the students from the school. She was in the workshop we ran. Attentive and confident, she had shuffled students around to position herself to sit next to me all morning. I liked her bold style. She had smiled shyly at me the whole time. Walking towards me now, she has changed out of her school uniform which is why I didn’t recognise her. Her clothes are oversized, stained and threadbare. A dirty white singlet hangs limply over a patched-together skirt. The material seems awkward on her lithe frame. Barefoot. She looks so vastly different from her clean, coordinated, green school uniform replete with white socks and lace-up black brogues. It’s hard to believe she is the same girl from an hour ago. Her name is Mariama. It means ‘gift from God’. She gives me a glorious smile and takes my hand.
Family hub: the cooking shelter. Photo: Nina Ginsberg.
Mariama leads me to a shelter to meet her family. There are many of these ‘family clusters’ around here – hidden, unknown, near-inaccessible. ‘Here’ is a grouplet of three ‘dirty brick’ huts. I’m surrounded by extreme poverty. The huts are dotted around a cleared centre which is the hub of all family life. In the middle is the cooking place. Under a corrugated iron roof held up by poles, I take my lead from the older women and join them around the open fire pit.
Mariama is animated as she tells the women about me. They smile while looking me up and down. Small groups of young children appear and mill around, watching, listening, whispering, giggling. Some of the kids sit on their mothers and watch the braver ones sit near me. An overheated dog snoozes as a wretched little chick walks over it. A rubbish pile smoulders nearby. An assembly line of freshly made mud bricks is drying off to the right, and a collection of single-use alcohol sachets are littered on the left. Flies buzz. Everywhere I look, skin sparkles as sunlight catches diamonds of sweat. The fragrant, sweet smell of red palm oil simmering in a cauldron wafts through the compound. I hear birds calling in the surrounding bush. Clumps of overgrown tallgrass tower at the edge of the clearing and rustle noisily in the wind. The women are clicking their tongues, quipping in Temne, and raising their eyebrows in my direction. They find me amusing. I sit down quietly on the closest stone.
Snoozing dog and wretched chick. Photo: Nina Ginsberg.
Mariama’s English is good and she translates our introductions, adding explanations and embellishments freely. We chat, suspended in time. Refreshments materialise. We talk about family, life and women’s business. After a while, I feel a shift in the mood. The conversation peeters out. Silence. I wait. Mariama’s mother nods to her daughter, who turns to me with a massive smile. Something has transpired, but I’m not sure what. I hold the moment, and the other women do the same.
Mama looks directly at me. I meet her gaze and hold, watching her intently. She has my full attention. She nods at me then closes her eyes. I watch her breathe. Time flattens. Tenderly and gently, Mama starts to clap. Refrain. Then she starts to sing in Temne. Lowly evanescence. Her lilt is stirring and ephemeral. The Aunties are nodding. The wind stops to listen. Mama’s voice is clear as it reaches out, rising and falling, pouring in and spilling over, flowing between and rippling through. I feel her voice seep into my bones. The Aunties join in. Snoozing dog opens an eye, sighs contentedly, and returns to slumber. The singing is rich and resonating, full of emotion and vitality. My heart pines. The timbre is achingly melodious. I listen, transfixed. After a few rounds, the lyrics change. I hear my name, ‘Nina’, included. My scalp tingles. All the women watch me as they increase in volume and enthusiasm. I am barely breathing. Mariama is singing too. She turns to me with bright eyes – what an angelic gift. The singing is still building. I feel what she is going to say before she says it. I don’t need words to know what is happening. ‘It’s for you’ she says, ‘they are singing you in.’
As I work on my bicycling PhD, time seems to lengthen, flatten and conflate.
Timestamps such as teaching semesters, due dates, and Public Holidays mean little to me as I continue to work independently on my self-directed community bike research.
But today is different.
January 26th stands out for me (as it does for many others): ideologically politically, socially and culturally as a very challenging day.
This is because two significant events occurred on this date that continue to have reverberations – and both of which have a particular link and meaning to me and my research. (Read to the end of this post to find out why).
Trouble in Australia
Where I live in Australia and around the world, January 26th historically and currently continues to be a date on which a number of transgressive and contested struggles have been brought to the surface.
Here are two main reasons society should be engaging with challenging conversations on January 26th.
In Australia, January 26th is a VERY controversial date.
This date is the official national (holi)day of Australia – what many call ‘Australia Day’.
It has also been called Anniversary Day, First Landing Day and Foundation Day.
It was on this date in 1788 that the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove* and white colonisers ‘claimed’ sovereignty over Australia.
Australia Day has been positioned in politics and the media as being a day to celebrate national pride and the diverse Australian community.
But such ‘celebrations’ negate Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and First Nations peoples who were here well before European colonisers arrived, but who suffered the brutal and fatal hostile take-over of colonisers, the legacy of which is still very much alive today.
Despite what your position is on this issue, it is important to keep engaging with a range of voices, ideas and perspectives. It is unconscionable to simply reject, disengage or ignore that this debate is going on – such a social issue demands attention and action.
Image: Namila Benson (Instagram)
This blog has thousands of readers, many of whom are outside Australia and may not be aware of this debate.
So I’ve put together an initial list showcasing a range of indigenous, academic, educational and news commentaries below for our international friends and those interested in learning more:
But January 26th is not only a day of confrontation in Australia.
*Many of us growing up in Australia were taught in school that it was Captain Cook who landed the First Fleet in January 1788, but in actual fact, it was Captain Arthur Phillip. Captain Cook had been dead for nine years at that point. Just goes to show there are serious discrepancies in the so-called factual reporting and historical educational/news reproductions of this event that needs to be interrogated and revised to be more accurate… and most important of these is the truthtelling, recognition, experiences, and the standing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples.
Trouble on January 26th (2000) in the USA
Elsewhere, this date is also infamous, but for different reasons.
On this date, 21-years ago in New York, American rock band Rage Against the Machine (famous for their provocative and revolutionary political views and lyrics) played on the steps of the US Stock Exchange.
They had a permit to play and were recording a music video with Michael Moore for their song ‘Sleep now with the fire’ (which is about capitalism and greed).
The video pretty much shows what happened.
It is essential viewing and I set it for homework for my students.
Yup…it’s (still) that good!!
Essentially, with several hundred fans watching on, the protest-concert-flash mob-recording was considered so disruptive and ‘dangerous’ that the cops were called in and scuffles broke out. During the confrontation, security made the call to shut down the New York Stock Exchange – a move that had never happened before in its 200-year history…and one that many saw as a successful, direct political challenge to halt capitalism.
These two events are very important individually, but there is a specific link for me between the two as well.
A particularly unsettling link
As a middle-aged, temporarily able-bodied, Australian, white, educated, female conducting research located in disadvantaged communities in Sierra Leone (West Africa) issues of power, gender, race, and ethics are paramount.
As a researcher, I constantly need to revisit my relationality to my research from the point of view of:
Subjectivity: to what degree this research is influenced by my subjective, personal perspectives, values, preferences, opinions, feelings, and experiences.
Positionality: What is the stance or position of me (researcher) in relation to aspects of the study (participants, places, communities, organizations)
Ethics: To uphold ethical conduct and the highest integrity for the design, conduct, activities and reporting of the research.
Postcolonialityis another ongoing tension I wrestle with in my research.
Forefront in my mind is to avoid being another white person (benefiting from) doing research ‘on’ a southern, disadvantaged community – and thus reinscribing the very exploitative colonial practices and not the empowering/progressive alternative my research claims to be.
So on January 26th, I am ideologicallyand culturally engaged and moved by both these events and ongoing challenges – and the kicker for me is this:
Although I am not specifically named after Columbus’ ship The Nina (I’m named after a great Aunt), the intertwining link between these two events AND my name PLUS the inherent (post)colonial challenges inherent in my research adds extra complexity and assumed accountability for me based on past-present implications of/for colonization, greed, extractivism, and exploitation.
Such a link is a weighty reminder for me.
And I take it very seriously.
This is why January 26th has an even greater significance for me.
So, I am not ‘celebrating’ today.
Instead, I’m taking time to think deeply about these events (and around the world) and look at who has power, who does not, and to consider my role in situations where social injustices occur.
We should all be engaging more directly, intelligently and honestly with such events.
Alfred (L), Kadi, Deborah, Isata (middle R), Nina and Stylish (R). Isata’s bike shop Makeni, Sierra Leone. Feb 2020.
Happy New Year all!
I hope you have been enjoying your time on and off the bike – and gearing up for another productive year!
Regular readers know that BCC is not your average mainstream cycling blog ….. it is anything but!
For my first post of 2021, I am revisiting this blog’s manifesto and ongoing guiding commitment to support a range of bike experiences that celebrating inclusion and diversity.
This blog promotes positive and inclusive bike experiences
This blog’s key focus is to share stories where bicycles create positive community and environmental change.
The content you find here covers my bicycle Ph.D. (readings, research, ideas) as well as awesome bike-focused people, places, groups, and events from Australia and around the world.
This blog’s motto is: Have fun, rides bikes, do good.
Here at Bicycles Create Change (BCC), I talk a lot about gender, sustainability, dogs/animals, community, inclusion, social justice, access for all, recycling, supporting outliers, education, families, kids, modified bikes for diff-abilities, people over 60, people under 15, art bikes, bicycle community groups, returned war veterans, gardening, school/education, mobility, creativity and art, making your own trails and riding around your local community. Type keywords into the blog search to see full posts.
This blog brings you stories from around the world
Over the years we have travelled far and wide: Afghanistan, South Korea, India, Tibet, Ireland, Norway, Iceland, South Africa, China, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Uganda, Isreal, Belize, Japan, Gambia, the Philippines, Sierra Leone, The Cook Islands, Laos, Brazil, Sri Lanka, the Netherlands, Iraq, Mexico, Colombia, Pakistan, New Zealand, Argentina, the Himalayas, Finland, Sudan, Ghana, Vietnam, Uruguay, Darfur, Nepal, Ethiopia, Peru, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cambodia, Tanzania, and internally displaced people (IDP – ‘refugee’) camps around the world….to name a few… type keywords into the blog search to see full posts for these places.
…yes there is an incredibly rich bicycling world outside Europe and North America!
In Australia, we have visited all the major cities – Brisbane (where I am now based) Melbourne (my home town), Sydney, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, Hobart, Canberra, Alice Springs) and their awesome bicycling adventures.
We have also traveled more widely in Australia to showcase rural locations and places outside big urban cities like: Kunnanurra (WA), Ballarat (VIC), Adelaide Hills (SA), Lismore (QLD), Dubbo (NSW), Bendigo (VIC), Woodfordia (QLD), North & South Spit Area (Sunshine Coast, QLD), Chewton, (regional VIC), Woodend (VIC), Goldfields district (regional VIC), and bike rides spanning the full East Coast of Australia. (*Epic!*).
As an alternative to the oversaturation of hegemonic, mainstream, consumer-based, profit-driven, western-English speaking-heterosexual-male-white-wealthy-middle aged-fit-able bodied-road riding-elitist-centric news and blog sites you can get any(every)where, this blog’s purview has always delighted a range of different biking experiences that shows a greater diversity of bicycling experiences.
So on this blog, I talk about ‘biking’ – not ‘cycling’.
At BCC, I’ve covered a huge range of awesome community bike-themed events you won’t find collated elsewhere, like: The Kurilpa Derby, The Yarn Ride, The Brisbane Big Push, Bike Hack, Climate Action Rallies, Bike Art Exhibitions, ANZAC Day Commemorations, 6-Day Brisbane (track sprint competition), Halloween Rides, National Sustainability Festivals, Brisbane Bike Film Festival, 3Plus3 MTB, NAIDOC Week bike events, Ride the Night events, Chicks Who Ride Bikes (CWRB) events, Melburn Roubaix, Bike Rave Melburn: Pink Flamingo Edition, Witches Rides, Alley Cat Races, Animals on Bikes Art Trails, Bayview Blast, the annual, all-female Chicks in the Sticks MTB event, Bike Palooza, Full Moon Rides, National Bike Week, Ride to Work events, Holi Festival, Commonwealth Games MTB, Sustainable Living Festivals, Woodford Folk Festival, Style over Speed rides, Slow Rolls, Zombie Bike Rides … and heaps more (*phew*!). Type any of these keywords into the blog search to see full posts for these events.
And I’ve had lots of abstracts accepted, attended, followed up on, and presented at LOTS of conferences to share our story and learn more from others, like: Australian Walking and Cycling Conference (AWCC) (Adelaide, SA), Reconciling research paradoxes: Justice in a post-truth world (Brisbane, QLD), Bike Hack (Brisbane, QLD), English Australia National Conferences (Sydney, NSW) Bike Week (Brisbane, QLD), Australia Association for Research in Education (AARE) (Brisbane, QLD), Bicycle Network: Bike Futures (Melbourne, VIC), 8th International Cycling Saftey Conference (Brisbane, QLD), Bike Palooza (Bendigo, VIC), Re-Imaging Education for Democracy Summit (Brisbane, QLD), Freshlines Symposia (Brisbane, QLD), University English Centers Australia (UECA) Assessment Symposium (Brisbane, QLD), Pedagogies in the Wild Conference (Cape Town, South Africa), 10th Annual New Materialisms Conference of Reconfiguring Higher Education (Cape Town, South Africa), Asia Pacific Cyle Congress (Christchurch, NZ), International Cycling Conference (Germany), International Exhibition and Conference in Higher Education (IECHE) (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia)…. and more (*double phew*!!). Type keywords into the blog search to see full posts for these conferences.
Promoting diverse perspectives and bikey lifeworlds
For over 6 years, I’ve worked hard to share a range of stories from around the world that centre on everyday people, community groups and places (not Aust, UK or USA) that are often underrepresented, unknown or unrecognized for the positive impact they are making with bicycles.
And this year, I will continue to share stories that are community-based, diverse, relatable and inspirational.
To kick off 2021 – I have dug into the archives to bring you a showcase of some of the remarkably diverse people and projects I have shared in the past.
Here’s are a few diversity posts you should check out if you missed them:
As I was preparing this post and going back over these older stories (and so many more from the blog), it filled me with immense satisfaction. I love that this blog continues to provide a platform for incredible bike stories to be shared and celebrated that would otherwise remain relatively unknown – and I’m looking forward to continuing this mission in 2021!
There are many reasons why I love where I’m currently living and riding. I live on Narlang Quandamooka land which is Morton Bayside 25 km out of Brisbane (AUST).
In my neighbourhood, we have fantastic bayside foreshore pathways, heritage-listed Mangrove reserves, native bushland and swathes of green parklands. The natural environment was a definitive reason for us choosing to live here.
I’m often out and about on my bike and I love to meet people who are doing the same.
While I’m in the throes of data analysis and working hard on my PhD bicycle research, it feels even more important to keep connected with the two-wheeled community.
I have a number of ongoing side projects that I like to keep percolating. My Instagram #Bikes_CISTA project is one I have not updated in a while due to COVID and I was delighted to have the opportunity to do so recently.
This is an ongoing project I started in February 2017.
The ‘CISTA’ acronym of #Bikes_CISTA stands for Cycling Interspecies Team of Awesomeness.
The Cycling Interspecies Team of Awesomeness (or Bikes_CISTA) Project is a photographic collection of encounters I’ve had with biking strangers while riding Leki (my flower bike) around my neighbourhood. It features people I spontaneously see, introduce myself to, have a chat with and invite them to join ‘the team’ (completely optional).
The eligibility for a #Bikes_CISTA invite requires:
at least one person
at least one dog
at least one bike
all are happy to stop and have a chat with me
are happy for me to share their photo and their CISTA story
It is a great way to keep me connected to my community, actively meet new people and celebrate one of the most important (non-religious) ‘holy trinities’ of being a positive and active community member that I hold near and dear: being on bikes, being with dogs and being outside enjoying nature and community….and all this at once.
COVID put a serious dent in #Bikes_CISTA activities. The last entry was #Bikes_CISTA #49 on November 2019. Considering at start of 2020 I was in West Africa for fieldwork and then COVID hit – I suppose no updates is actually quite reasonable! Since then, I haven’t given it much thought until this week I was presented with a golden #Bikes_CISTA opportunity I just couldn’t pass up.
So without further ado – meet John, his bike, Diesel and Roxy … who are our #Bikes _CISTA #50!
Meet John, his bike, Diesel and Roxy – #Bikes_CISTA
I was out walking Zoe during a PhD study break and I saw this awesome team riding towards me. The trailer caught my eye. Spontaneously I blurted out something to John as he rode toward me about how cool the trailer was and how great it was to see him and the dogs out on two wheels.
To my delight, John was happy to stop and have a chat – woo-hoo!
Diesel is the larger white bitsa in the front and Roxy is in the back. These two dynamos are rescue dogs and a very happy misfit pair – what a great outcome for all!
John lives in Cleveland and often rides Diesel and Roxy along the Morton Bay Cycleway for a regular cruisey Cleveland-Thornside-Lota-Manly return ride.
John’s dog trailer is simple but effective. He has modified a standard trailer setup to include shade ontop and Roxy’s basket on the end. He has to augment the axel a little to redistribute the weight for the two pooches.
There are rubber insulated mats on the floor plus a little extra cushioning for puppy comfort.
I was interested to hear he had put some barrier up around the bottom of the tray to make sure wayward tails didn’t get knocked about or accidentally caught in wheels, which was a particularly considerate addition.
We chatted happily in the afternoon sun about bikes, dogs, riding with dogs and riding this local route – all while the puppies watched on.
I love that John was wearing a ‘No bad dogs’ T-shirt as well!
Morton Bay Cycleway. Image: Visit Brisbane
Funnily enough the very next day after meeting this crew, I saw them again while riding Leki along the foreshore. I was cruising past a busy tourist area and saw John’s bike parked under a tree.
I stopped and left my business card, but then I saw John walking Diesel and Roxy a little further on. How lucky!
So we stopped for another chat. Hooray!
This dual interaction made me so happy. I loved the opportunistic randomness of the initial connection which was fun and interesting and genuine – and then to have it reinforced the very next day was just lovely.
I’ll be keeping my eyes open for this fantastic #Bikes_CISTA team from now on.
It makes me happy to know there are awesome bike-people-dogs like this cruising around my community spreading positivity, good company, and wholeheartedly celebrating the #Bikes_CISTA philosophy in their own engaging way.
Happy return #Bikes_CISTA teams!
Adorable! Diesel (L) and Roxy (R) ready to ‘ride on dad!’
This is an ongoing initiative that gives an
individual or organisation the opportunity to control the Cycling Brisbane
(@cyclingbrisbane) Instagram account for 7 days.
This is a great way to showcase community
members and local biking groups various interests, perspectives and personalities.
The idea is that participants share their views
of what riding in Brisbane means to them.
This account has guest host takeovers by an impressive range of Brisbane cycling and biking enthusiasts including Colony (BMX), Queensland Police, specific-type-of-bike fanatic/s, school groups, racers, families, local businesses, MTB clubs and more!
Similarly to this blog, my takeover key themes are inclusion, participation and diversity for a range of ages and stages of the community and for all types of cycling.
Ongoing motifs will also be dogs, local personalities, riding for enjoyment, having fun, sustainability/recycling, getting out in nature and showing off my local bayside surrounds.
And of course, lots of photos of Leki my
flowerbike!
To do a @cyclingbrisbane takeover, you can
either contact the organizers (at the link in the IG bio) or you are directly approached
through the local cycling network or because someone knows/recommends you.
From there it straightforward. After you receive the terms and conditions and fill out the consent, then you receive the account login and dates of the takeover
I was contacted directly by the organizers who I
know through various local biking events.
During the takeover, you need to upload between
1- 4 images per day to the @cyclingbrisbane Instagram account.
The idea is that images should be inspiring,
visually appealing and most importantly representative of the great cycling
options around Brisbane.
Content should
align with Cycling Brisbane’s core themes of commuting, connectivity,
discovering Brisbane by bike or active and healthy lifestyles.
You can only upload images and/or videos and
they have to be your own original work.
Uploads need to include the hashtag #cyclingbne
Of course, all content uploaded needs to model responsible
cycling practices. So, you need to obey road rules, wear a helmet and not use a
mobile phone while riding a bike. That’s why there are no selfies of people riding their bikes.
This is a great initiative and one that other organizations might consider doing to increase engagement, exposure and diversity in their social media platforms.
It also makes it much more interesting for those
who follow the account because each week you are getting these insights into the
vastly different people, places and biking lifeworlds that make up our Brisbane
bicycle/cycling community.
Lately, I’ve been craving extra time and space to explore New Materialist more generatively, At uni, the time is limited and often, more senior academics take-over theory session. .. and the HDRers still left with answers.
So instead of relying on supervisors, I decided to invite five trusted New Materialist and Posthumanist PhD friends for a day-long study group/workshop in my garden where we could all collaborate to create and share knowledge.
I planned the day so there was room for sharing, discussion, thinking, writing and activities -and also time to do some gardening! I had organized a full-day program (see below).
Each participant nominated an NM tropic to share/teach the group.
New Materialism is an umbrella term for a range of theoretical perspectives that share a re-turn focus on matter. Recently, feminist New Materialisms (fNM) has gained momentum due to a unique consideration for the agency of all matter. In fNM understandings, habitual human-centric ways of thinking, doing and being are disrupted as an ethico-onto-epistemological approach emerges.
FNM is exciting, complex and emerging – and a challenge for PGs. Because it is so difficult to understand, PGs often rely on supervisors and academics as ‘experts’ for ways to understand and apply fNM. This reliance bypasses autodidactic learning. But what might be possible if the formalities and associated materialities of this power structure were disrupted and reframed? Inspired by the fNM central ethical tenet of flattening power hierarchies within and across the Academy, I am hostingThe New Materialist’s Garden.
This research session is an independent, one-day, fNM theory/methodology ‘study group’ held in my garden. The garden provides an alternative ‘learning context’ that deliberately disrupted and displaced traditional notions about academic knowledge, performances, educational spaces and who is ‘an expert’.
The aim of this day is to see what insights and ‘wonder’ (McLure, 2012) might emerge when HDRs collaborate to share and reframe experiences of ‘thinking-doing-being’ fNM research and what it is to be ‘experts-becoming’.
I hope this experience will help/encourage/inspire (post)grads to trouble the ways they are ‘thinking-doing-being’ theory and who are ‘research experts’.
Expert ‘queering’ is a significant shift for PG and emerging researchers to contend with, but even more so as they transition beyond candidature.
Hopefully, such reframings will not only aid in their current research, but also enable more (post)grads to view themselves as ‘experts/researchers-becoming’ rather than ‘student/candidate-unchanging’.
My abstract for the upcoming Pedagogies in the Wild Conference has been accepted!
This is great news because I already have an abstract accepted for the international 2019 New Materialist Reconfigurations of Higher Education Conference(Dec 2-4th 2019) and this conference follows straight after (4-6th December) and is at the same place – the University of the Western Cape (Cape Town, South Africa).
I am working towards a research trifecta: 2 conferences and fieldwork in the one trip.
This conference is being affectionately referred to ‘the D & G conference’.
That is because it focuses on integrating the work of two highly influential scholars whose work is transdisciplinary and has had ‘epic consequence’ in many fields – Deleuze and Guattari. Gilles Deleuze is a philosopher and Felix Guattari is a psychoanalyst. Some their most influential works are: Anti-Oedipus, What Is Philosophy? and A Thousand Plateaus. They have written extensively together on an array of topics. In particular for my project, their work has been foundational in extending New Materialists understandings.
The Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019 is being run for the third time and is solely focused on unpacking, exploring and apply Deleuze-Guattarian thinking and approaches.
As many regular readers of this blog know, my research is complexified by interrogating various aspects of power relations – such as gender in/justice, post-colonialism, and what/who are academic/research/educational ‘experts’.
The session I will be presenting is based on a publication I currently writing with my amazingly brave PhD Supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon.
Title: Cycling-with-through-and-on the edge of the PhD supervisor-candidate relationship: A post-humanist bike ride to a different place.
Abstract: Traditionally, the PhD supervision relationship is predicated on a supervisor as expert – supervisee as learner/novice model of knowledge transmission. Most of the supervisory work is performed either on the university campus or via digital channels that allow the ‘expert’ to direct the conversation and establish the performance expectations for both candidate and supervisor. But what might be possible if the formalities and associated materialities of this power structure were to be disrupted and reframed?
This session presents insights that emerged when a PhD candidate and her Supervisor shared a bayside bicycle ride in Brisbane, Australia, to see what would happen. While the candidate was an expert
bike rider, her Supervisor was far less experienced and somewhat anxious about
her (st)ability. The bicycle ride was viewed as a
way of deliberately disrupting and displacing traditional notions around
academic performances, spaces of learning and who gets to navigate.
What emerged was surprising,
revealing and uncomfortable.
The bicycle ride enabled
encounters with/in the world/self that worked to queer the way in which both
Supervisor and candidate understood their relationship. We contend that the
candidate/supervisor relationship is an iterative and dynamic entanglement of
forces wherein subjectivities, bodily performances, past experiences, fears,
technologies, planned and unplanned encounters are forever and always
entangled.
Influenced by Baradian philosophy,
this session focuses on the material-discursive-affective phenomena that
emerged as the experience of riding-with the candidate/supervisor. In this way “systems of entrapment that manifest power relations in the academy” and “instigate codes of conduct and…exclusionary practices that can limit how academic knowledges…are produced” (Charteris et al., 2019, p. 2) are able to be troubled, re-thought and re-balanced.
My PhD Supervisor Dr Sherilyn Lennon and I on our bike ride. Sat. 22nd June, 2019.
What is Pedagogies in the Wild Conference 2019?
Here is more about the conference: The recent #Rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests have set South African higher education on a new course towards transformation, focusing on equitable access to higher education, Africanisation and decolonisation.
Similar movements have reverberated across the globe,
addressing issues of neoliberalism, for example in Canada, the UK, the
Netherlands and Chile; racism, as in Ghana and the US; and curfews on women
students in India.
This has raised important questions regarding knowledge
production; continuing structural racism, patriarchy, homophobia and
transphobia; the use and value of western theorists in research and curricula;
and who gains epistemological and physical access to higher education.
On the other hand, we have seen many productive junctures
between pedagogy, education studies and the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari.
In particular, there has been a focus on cartography, schizoanalysis, corporeal
theorising, rhizomatic learning and nomadic thought in socially just
pedagogical praxis.
These junctures and innovative genealogies and
methodologies can both address these issues and be further improved and made
more precise by engagements with what it means to transform and reconfigure
pedagogies and practices in higher education.
Image: Pedagogies in the Wild 2019
My Conference Stream – Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling
Topic 2. Spaces, Spatiality and Unschooling: Places of/and/un/Learning in Higher Education
How can we challenge assumptions
such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of
materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?
Expanded Conference Topic 2
Higher education spaces are usually considered in relation
to how they optimise student learning and, increasingly, how they optimise
marketing potential to attract new students.
In addition, meanings of ‘space’, ‘place’, ‘environment’ and
‘context’ are often elided, and it is taken for granted that learning happens
in classrooms, seminar rooms and lecture halls.
Such discourses take space for granted as a neutral background
on which human endeavour is located.
Unschooling (in a meta sense rather than the narrow sense of
homeschooling) resists this kind of pedagogy in favour of building real
communities and replacing dry, nationalist agendas with different kinds of training
programs, learning opportunities and methodologies, apprenticeships,
internships and mentorships.
Unschooling thus represents a material politics aimed at
genuine social freedom and enjoyable learning. Normative ways of understanding
space and schooling are challenged by Deleuze-Guattarian understandings which,
instead, conceptualise space as an entangled ‘constellation of human–nonhuman
agencies, forces and events’ (Taylor, 2013: 688) within which objects, bodies
and things do surprising and important if often unnoticed and mundane work as
material agents and actants.
Theoretically, such work draws on and takes forward the rich
traditions of feminist and postmodernist understandings of space developed by
Doreen Massey, Henri Lefebvre, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of space and
striation.
This theme therefore wishes to open up debates about higher
education spaces by considering questions such as:
What is the role of architecture, design and infrastructure in higher education?
How might the materialities of higher education spaces and places be conceptualised via inter-, multi- and post-disciplinary frameworks?
How can we take account of the importance of places of informal learning?
How does the iterative materialisation of space-time-matter come to matter in higher education spaces?
How is higher education being spatially reconfigured in relation to global flows of bodies?
Which/ whose bodies matter in higher education spaces?
What new spatial imaginaries are needed for higher education to thrive?
How can feminist new materialisms in its overlaps and divergences with Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy aid us to produce new understandings of space-place-matter entanglements in higher education?
How can we challenge assumptions such as ‘knowledge belongs to experts’ in favour of materialist/experimental/experiential collaborations in teaching and learning?
What kinds of material and affective potential does unschooling offer us for thinking about curriculum development in Higher Education.
