Dear all - please see the text below, and be careful to respond to Phil or Glen rather than me.
CFP: GEOGRAPHIES OF CYCLING, AAG, Boston, April 15-19, 2008
Once heralded as a useful indicator of social and technical modernity, and now
championed as a postmodern and sustainable alternative to
fossil-fueled transport, cycling has had a significant historical
impact on global societies and geographies since its inception in the
1860s (Norcliffe 2001; Horton, Rosen and Cox 2007). Proclaimed the
"freedom machine" (especially in its current off-road versions) the
bicycle facilitates new geographies of personal travel; so much so
that it was a significant factor in the improvement of public transit
at the turn of the twentieth century (Armstrong and Nelles 1977). The
bicycle's ubiquity in cities has made it an especially important agent
of the public, and scholars have begun writing about bicycle flaneurie
(Mackintosh and Norcliffe
2006; Oddy 2007) and the social meanings of mobile practice (Spinney
2007). Its early adoption by women marked an important step in the
embourgeoisment of public spaces (Mackintosh 2007) and the
feminization of the public sphere (Garvey 1995). Bicycle clubs and
bicycle racing, while powerful manifestations of Victorian manhood
(Mackintosh and Norcliffe 2007) were not restricted to men; women's
bicycle racing exemplified the capitalist influence on gendered
conceptions of the bicycle and the unevenness of racing by men and
women (Simpson 2007). Bicycling further helped black Americans combat
the racial iniquities of Jim Crow (Ritchie 1988). Working bicycles and
tricycles, the
"delivery vans" of the developing world, offer accessible, low-cost
and energy-efficient local transportation, and are often better
navigators of the congested mega-cities of the global South (Boal
2006). And rapid changes in global
supply chains used to manufacture cycles may anticipate future
restructuring of the world vehicle industry, with which it shares many
common production characteristics. Thus, the continuing historical,
social, cultural, urban, political, economic and population
geographies of the bicycle and tricycle,and their technological
variations, demand further attention of geographers, and this
organized session invites papers that take up the challenge.
Please send abstracts of no more than 200 words, before October 10,
2007, to one of the following organizers:
Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Brock University <[log in to unmask]>
Glen Norcliffe, York University <[log in to unmask]>
--
Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Geography
Brock University
500 Glenridge Ave.
St. Catharines, Ontario
Canada
L2S 3A1
Phone: 905-688-5550 x 5221
Fax: 905-688-6369
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