This document summarizes the current state of academic research on cycling. It discusses how research has shifted from economics and engineering to incorporate sociology and geography. Researchers now take a "mobilities turn" to examine how emotions, culture and social practices influence mobility. While research has provided insights into infrastructure design and user segmentation, understanding the various meanings of cycling to different groups remains underdeveloped. The document suggests future research could apply social practice theory and culturally-focused lenses to capture the multiple knowledges at play. It concludes that cycling research is more interdisciplinary and socio-culturally focused than in the past.

1. Where are we at in academia
with cycling: what do we know?
Geoff Vigar, Rorie Parsons
Newcastle University

2. structure
• Disciplinary
orientations
• A mobilities turn
• Cycling Research in
academia
• Futures
• Conclusions

3. Shifting disciplinary focus?
• Economics and engineering, with a bit of
psychology
• The curious historic neglect in sociology:
– mobility as fundamental sociological
phenomenon;
– significance/ difference in modernity
• Transport Geography shifts from rather dusty
cul-de-sacs…?

4. A mobilities turn
• Humans are not rational, well at
least not always, context has
infinite depth
• automobility as a most significant
socio-technical system
• Emotion, affect and atmosphere are
important in explaining how and
why people move or do not move
• Assemblages of people, objects,
atmospheres, ideas are significant
• Methodologically mixed but much
more ethnographic in orientation
• Post-disciplinary

5. Cycling Research in Academia
• Some clarity in the
segregation debate
• Some research [and
policy] still in ‘ABC’ mode
ie seeing citizens as
rational consumers?
• And much policy and
research focused overly
on the individual
• Nods to ‘segmentation’
but nature of meaning of
cycling to different groups
underdeveloped?

6. future paths [among many]
• Social Practice Theory; interactions between meanings and
materials most significant?
• Cultures: in workplaces, in neighbourhoods, cities and their
interplay with each other, with infrastructural opportunity etc
• Uncovering the multiple epistemology at play in research and
practice: how are technical, embodied, and practice-centred
knowledges brought together?
• Changing roles for the local state: citizens more in control but
how?
• Smart cities, immobilities and social justice
• Possibilities of design thinking: as participatory method; as
way of making ‘leaps’: as probes and provocations

7. conclusions
• More cycling research than ever, and its more
interesting!
• Shift from positivist, individual-centred
research toward embracing a more nuanced
socio-cultural understanding of who cycles,
when and why [and who doesn’t] … and what
this means for policy and practice
• Post and trans-disciplinarity ie advocates and
academics together with others