Our presentation explores the conceptual contributions that the humanities can make to cycling studies. Bicycles, ubiquitous around the globe, are versatile and adaptable instruments used across extremely diverse demographics, in many different contexts, and for manifold purposes. Bicycles also have wide-ranging effects: being a bike user, and even being around such users, shapes one’s consciousness, thoughts, and moods. As such, bicycles represent important opportunities for research that goes beyond the object of the bicycle as a means of mobility to the practice of cycling as a form of mediation between oneself and the world.

In expanding how we think about bicycles and cycling, we can also expand the interdisciplinary frameworks we bring to cycling studies more generally. What the humanities can offer, we argue, is a reflexive and critical lens attuned to issues of meaning and subjectivity—those qualities most resistant to quantitative, statistical, empirical, and applied perspectives. Moreover, as Stefan Collini (2012) and Geoffrey Galt Harpham (2013) have argued, the humanities foreground the interpretive, cultural, and affective dimensions of human experience while resisting the strictures of disciplinarity. This resistance, we argue, is precisely what cycling studies might employ to move beyond siloed disciplinary models toward more integrative and dynamic forms of interdisciplinarity, allowing us to rethink more broadly the questions we ask, the contexts in which we ask them, and the assumptions that we bring to cycling research.

This shift—from object-centered analyses of the bicycle to humanities-informed and experience-centered inquiries into cycling—opens up new avenues for research that is both interdisciplinary and critically reflexive. Ultimately, a humanities-informed approach to cycling studies is methodologically open, critically engaged, and responsive to issues of power, identity, and access. In advocating such a conceptual shift, we invite scholars across disciplines to rethink cycling not just as a means of mobility, but as a transformative interface between self and world.

Works Cited

Collini S (2012). What Are Universities For? Penguin, London

Harpham GG (2013). “Finding Ourselves: The Humanities as a Discipline.” American Literary
History 25(3): 509–34. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43817585