Worlding cycling: an anthropological agenda for urban cycling research

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article carves out a role for anthropologists in cycling research and develops the outlines of a research agenda for urban cycling in the discipline of anthropology. Recently, scholars of urban cycling have questioned the predominant focus on renowned European cycling cities, cautioning against the danger of universalising European experiences in cycling research, and proposing to instead start worlding cycling research. The term worlding is used to describe the aim of theorizing from the global South as an alternative to the idea that European theories are universal. I respond to this call from the perspective of anthropology; a discipline that has developed frameworks, methods, and findings that challenge Eurocentric universalism and centralise the experiences of the global South. I suggest that anthropologists can support the project of worlding cycling research and in its turn, that cycling research may be an original pathway for conducting fundamental research in anthropology. To realise this mutual potential, what is needed is a transformation of both cycling research and anthropology: on the one hand the critical rethinking of some of the hierarchies of expertise presumed in cycling research, and on the other hand a transformation of some long-established methodological practices in anthropology.

Keywords

• Cycling
• anthropology
• interdisciplinarity
• worlding
• knowledge