This blog is an attempt to be serious about play, specifically playing on bicycles and keyboards.
I’m blogging on riding and writing. The riding blogs are not ride reports, and they’re certainly not academic critiques. Just my attempt to articulate the affect of my ride. The writing blogs think through writing as an embodied practice akin to riding.
I am a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis in Cultural Studies doing my dissertation on why people like to bike. This apparently simple inquiry has led me to study the bicycling boom of the 1970s and its most important legacy–mountain biking. Along with studying the history and culture of mountain biking, I am also examining the growth of bicycling in urban transportation, the expansion of do-it-yourself bike repair spaces, and the rise of various bicycling “lifestyle” subcultures.
So, come along for the ride!
Things I’m interested in: Altered states, body-technology relations, gender, sports, cultural studies, American studies, mobilities, and many other keywords.
This page has the following sub pages.
I found your blog from a link on “Savage Minds,” and I just wanted to toss out something that I had found disturbing at the time. A year ago, I was talking with two Colorado state wildlife biologists, and the subject of various outdoor user groups’ reactions to temporary road/trail closures (in order to protect elk calving areas, for example) came up.
Which group was most obnoxious over having a trail closed and demonstrated the greatest sense of entitlement? Was it the “motorheads,” the ATV riders? The hikers? The trail runners? No, they said, it was the mountain bikers.
Surprising? Or not?
My experience is that mountain bikers are today quite vocal in working to prevent trail closures to mountain biking. I’m sorry to hear that they are now expressing the same sense of entitlement that they critiqued in the early years of the sport. Given the sport’s growth, I’m not surprised but hope that they work toward better cooperation with land management.
Historically, mountain biking was banned from many lands in a process where many mountain bikers did not feel their voices were properly considered. In places such as Marin county (where most of my research is based), they argued that hikers and equestrian riders refused to share the trails without considering the other perspective. As the sport has grown, so has the sophistication of their advocacy. They work hard to demand a seat at the table in any land management decisions, and this may at times come across (and be) obnoxious and entitled.
Have you seen the latest paper published in the Journal of Political Ecology by Ben Weil on bike cultures in Davis? http://jpe.library.arizona.edu/Volume20/Volume_20.html