About Bicycle Media

Mobility is a cooperative process shaped by diverse media, social, and infrastructural practices. Cycling, too, is conditioned by the interplay of diverse technologies, infrastructures, bodies, images, and public spheres. At the same time, bicycle mobility is neither neutral nor equally accessible to everyone: it is shaped by social power relations and diverse experiential worlds.

Against this backdrop, the annual conference of the research project “Bicycle Media—Cooperative Practices of Mobility” (SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation”) examines the bicycle itself as a medium of public sphere and participation: as a form of mobility that connects people, places, perspectives, and knowledge, thereby enabling a specific appropriation of space. The conference takes as its starting point an expanded concept of media that encompasses not only audiovisual and digital formats but also understands (care) practices such as repair, activism, or collective cycling as forms of mediation.

Our perspective on cycling is shaped by media. Conversely, cycling also shapes media spaces. In this context, the papers presented at the annual conference examine the bicycle (and cycling) as a medium of embodied experience and perception, particularly in relation to public discourses, affects, bodies, and infrastructures. The conference will discuss diversity-sensitive and intersectional perspectives on bicycle mobility, for example with regard to mobility conflicts, gender and class relations, as well as unequal conditions of access and representations.