Mark F. N. Franke
Mark Franke is a Professor in the Centre for Global Social Innovation at Huron University College in London, Ontario, Canada. In previous years he has taught in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University, the Global and International Studies Program at the University of Northern British Columbia, and the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria.
Franke's teaching critically engages with cultural, discursive, and ideological formations of subjectivity and social/political relations in world–wide systems, focusing on problems in forced migration, patriarchy, racism, spatial/temporal constructions, mobilities, law, coloniality, citizenship, and governmentality. He is the author of Withdrawal from Immanuel Kant and International Relations: the Global Unlimited_ (Routledge 2024) and Global Limits: Immanuel Kant, International Relations, and Critique of World Politics (SUNY Press, 2001), and has published journal articles and book chapters on questions of refugees' rights, hospitality ethics, politics of movement, politics of critique, neutrality, political geographies of displacement, electronic technologies managing human movement, Indigenous self–determinations in law, and pedagogies of experiential learning. Franke's current program of research studies the politics of bicycling, as a form of modernist mobility that opens possibilities in how social spacings are formed, focusing on objectives in feminist politics, queer activism, antiracism, transportation justice actions, decoloniality, environmentalism, and critical movements in architecture.
Intervention
Efforts to accommodate cycling in relation to spaces established for the mobilities of cars bring about very difficult political fights. My objective is to learn how to understand and think the mobility of cycling in relation to the spatiality of car–driving, considering what it must take to overcome the fight of bikes vs. cars over space.
I begin this work by analysing core ways in which spatial conflict arises between cycling and car–driving. On this basis, I orient my investigation primarily through the contention that cycling is best thought through the idea of assemblage and the ontology of becoming, as theorised by Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Manuel DeLanda, and several other scholars of cycling. I do not propose that cycling is distinct from car–driving on this basis alone. However, I argue that the becoming assemblage of cycling is itself at odds with that of car–driving, resulting in the incessant conflict between the mobilities.
From this analysis, drawing from the ideas of such scholars as Inna Viriasova, Roberto Esposito, and Massimo Cacciari, I propose that the political conflict that typically plagues the spatial interrelations of cycling versus car–driving is rooted in the fact that, whereas car–driving invites the political governance of mobilities spatially, cycling is a mobility that forms fundamentally unpolitical or impolitical spacings, rendering cycling ungovernable with respect to the spatial determinants of car–driving.
Thinking cycling in the terms of the unpolitical and ungovernable, I recommend representing the spatial relations of cycling to car–driving in the terms of a "lawscape," as theorised by Andreas Philippopoulos–Mihalopoulos. In this way, I contend it is possible to understand how cycling poses a spatial rupture to spatial formations required through car–driving, making possible a withdrawal toward more just spacings of mobility.