Cycling – More than mobility? An ethnographic study of bicycle courses for refugee and migrant women in Germany
Cycling, a sustainable and healthy form of transportation, has increasingly been promoted as central to achieving the mobility turn across Europe. In Germany, the resulting cycling boom has produced significant disparities in cycling participation and exacerbated existing social inequalities, particularly among marginalised populations. For migrant and refugee women, barriers preventing bicycle usage are often compounded by intersecting gendered and socio-cultural conditions. Drawing on Munich as a case study, this research explores how the mobility practices of (forced) migrant women change after participation in a bicycle course. Conceptually, this project fuses a mobility cultures approach with practice-theoretical considerations to highlight the cultural and intersectional barriers and enablers of cycling. A multimethod approach is employed combining six months of extensive ethnographic fieldwork as a bicycle trainer in Munich with sixteen semi-structured interviews. The analysis reveals that cycling represents a more-than-mobility practice as it is highly associated with feelings of freedom, empowerment and belonging. Bicycle courses act as important interventions that enhance women’s access to cycling, enabling greater social participation and integration. However, barriers embedded in Germany’s mobility cultures prevent ongoing engagement with the bicycle. This research contends that greater academic and policy attention to the cultural dimensions of mobility is essential for engaging underrepresented groups and advancing socially just and inclusive urban mobility transitions.
