Katrina Jungnickel

Constructing Mobile Places between ‘Leisure’ and ‘Transport’: A Case Study of Two Group Cycle Rides

This article contributes to a growing literature examining the sociological significance of mobile places, exploring mobile place-making through an analysis of the practice of weekend group leisure cycling. These rides represent a mobility practice where the main aim of participants may be ‘leisure’ but most infrastructure used is designated for ‘transport’. Using ethnographic methods, the article provides an analysis of rhythm, positioning and communication on two group rides, one from Hull into the East Yorkshire countryside and one in London. External (including motor traffic flow and route type) and internal (including group composition and experience) factors shape the relationship between the riders and their ride, and hence the mobile places that they co-create. The article argues that cyclists riding in groups create distinctively flexible social spaces. These group cycling practices variously challenge, mimic and adapt to the motorized orientation of much road space.

Cycling’s Sensory Strategies: How Cyclists Mediate their Exposure to the Urban Environment

Abstract In this article, we focus on the many ways cyclists mediate their sensory exposure to the urban environment. Drawing on research in Hull, Hackney and Bristol during 2010 and 2011 for the Cycling Cultures research project, we describe a range of ‘sensory strategies’ enrolled by cyclists. Our research reveals how sensory strategies, such as using mobile audio devices, involve deliberate and finely tuned practices shaped by factors such as relaxation, motivation and location. This presents a contrast to media representations of the ‘iPod zombie cyclist’ who, plugged into a mobile audio device, lumbers insensitively and dangerously through the urban landscape. The article complicates the idea that sensory practices of listening and not-listening are two fixed and distinct ways of being in the urban environment. We suggest that considering the sensory strategies of cyclists opens up a new terrain for thinking about less easily represented, uncertain and fleeting intersections of mobility, place and the senses. Ultimately, we argue that an analysis of cycling’s sensory strategies might enrich our understanding of mobility cultures by operating to reconnect a range of mobile citizens with the broader messy and less easily controllable sensory landscape. This has implications both for understanding cycling as a sensory practice and for thinking about how the sensory dimensions of other mobile practices are shaped by practitioners.

Methodological entanglements in the field: methods, transitions and transmissions

While much discussion of art practice within research and university contexts tends to draw from ‘practice-led’ or ‘practice-based’ research, those practices outside the visual arts that deploy art-related methods and techniques often sit uncomfortably within other disciplines and struggle to be accounted for within official university accountabilities. This situation creates a divide between visual art accountable practices and those that do not fit. It is the latter category we wish to explore. As ethnographic researchers within cultural studies and sociology, the process of making and thinking through art-based methods is an integral part of doing research. Through the interdisciplinary process we seek to explore overlaps between traditional and non-traditional modes of making, presenting and transmitting knowledge to audiences.

Getting there…and back: how ethnographic commuting (by bicycle) shaped a study of Australian backyard technologists

Attention in ethnographic fieldwork, and particularly in multi-sited studies, has traditionally focused on the movement of people, things and ideas across distributed points. Recently, interest has gained purchase, particularly in mobilities and science and technology studies, on how the researcher physically gets from one place to another for the purpose of exploring the bearing, if any, mobility decisions and positionalities have on the nature of study and findings. The article contributes to this literature by defining four kinds of ethnographic mobility and focusing specifically on how a researcher gets there and back, or what can be termed ethnographic commuting. It draws on research conducted in two groups of backyard technologists in Australia (an initial study of a grassroots wireless network, which, as a result of my ethnographic commuting, grew to include a freakbike community). I discuss how cycling, initially adopted as a convenient form of transport between fieldsites, became an unexpected tool of enquiry, opening up new sites for study, providing entry into related social groups, catalysing new ways of thinking and, ultimately, (re)shaping my research. I highlight lessons learned and offer suggestions for approaching the ethnographic commute.

Sewing as a design method

This forum highlights conversations at the intersection of design methods and social studies of technology. By highlighting a diversity of perspectives on design interventions and programs, we aim to forge new connections between HCI design and communication, science and technology studies, and media studies scholarship. --- Daniela Rosner, Editor

Hacking Binaries/Hacking Hybrids: Understanding the Black/White Binary as a Socio-technical Practice

This essay argues that hacking binaries as well as hacking hybrids – theoretically, methodologically and activist as well as in the practice of everyday life – especially around issues of race is an important agenda for feminist technology studies. Using examples from art, architecture, social theory and personal experience, and drawing on science and technology studies (STS), we argue that theoretical and methodological hacking around the Black/White binary is a pathway to the deconstruction of other binaries (as well as reified hybrids) such as digital/material, global/local, private/public, individual/community, open/closed and amateur/professional, which are central to understanding emerging topics in gender, new media and technology.

Mods and Modding

‘Mods’ are modifications that come about when things do not quite fit as a result of changing conditions. They represent an almost infinite combinability of ideas, materials and applications and demonstrate makers’ aptitude for innovative responses. Drawing on examples I describe how makers mod not only technical materials but also find themselves tinkering with the broader technological landscape, social relations and stories as a means of dealing with socio-technical incoherence and instability. This chapter also discusses the Do-it-Together (DiT) nature of the network — the fact that it cannot be built alone. It requires the help of many others including families, partners, sisters, mothers, fathers and friends.

Who Makes WiFi (and Why Other Makers Matter)

WiFi is often understood (and overlooked) as a one-size fits-all phenomenon that exists ‘everywhere’ and ‘anytime’ and is packaged in a pay-plug-and-play format by large scale telecommunication distributors, mainly as a way to access the internet without wires. Yet, as this chapter illustrates, it is not ubiquitous or universal. In this case it is uniquely customised, culturally shaped, comprised of ordinary stuff in everyday places and made (and remade) by individuals on a daily basis. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies, I argue that the global starts with the local. In other words, other makers matter.

Trees, Birds, Sunburn and Other Digital Interruptions

When you take WiFi out of ‘hotspots’ and into the city itself it comes into contact with a range of social, technical and environmental actors. The network is stable. It has operated for over a decade and continues to grow in size and strength. Yet, members encounter an array of interruptions in the form of trees, birds, bugs, thieves, technical complications and weather. I show how rather than ignoring or tidying them up, WiFi makers build them into the network. This chapter explores how disconnections serve to connect makers to new ideas, people and places, signalling the possibility that the group’s ability to deal with constant indeterminacy and multiple realities affords it durability. Air-Stream make WiFi not in spite of interruption, but because of it.

The ‘Barbie’ and WiFi

This chapter is situated at a WiFi meeting. I describe the nature of membership and explain different forms of network connection. Foregrounding the multidimensional, co-located and occasionally contradictory nature of WiFi representations, I discuss how they connect people together, aid recruitment and teach members about new applications. I argue that the resilience and responsiveness of the seemingly scattergun visual culture is well suited to the idiosyncrasies of WiFi makers and their disparate ideas and approaches. I also introduce and explain the role of the barbeque or ‘barbie’ in the making of WiFi, arguing that it operates as a critical means of contending with the complexities of the technology by domesticating public spaces and cementing social ties.