Paper short abstract:

Through an ambulatory ethnography, we will question the urban mobility of bicycle activists. In their workshops, demonstrations and daily itineraries their political and environmental struggle materializes at the intersection of multiple axes, including the body, the city and technology.

Paper long abstract:

In bicycle activism, we must understand mobility as a mobile dwelling. More than a form of travel or displacement, it is an active and sensitive way of living the environment and a way of making the city on the move. The bicycle, a total symbol of environmentalism, is an ordinary but densely politicized and complex materiality. In this paper, through an incarnated and ambulatory ethnography -attentive to the practices, displacements, emotions, tactics, discourses and spaces of bicycle activism in the European urban context- we will cross the intersections between economy, ecology, politics and technology through concrete fieldwork examples. In local workshops based on recycling and bikes self-construction; in European meetings and assemblies; or in festive and rolling protests through the accelerated neoliberal city, the political cultures of mobility -in their paradoxes and ambiguities- express themselves, rebel and perform through a particular policy of materiality. Deceleration, reconnection with environment, carbon footprint reduction, human scale or the calm pace of cycling streets are imagined and precariously made transitions in the articulation of three main material fields: body, bicycle and the city. In this way, by assembling and mobilizing urban mobility, socioenvironmental conflicts such as energy crisis and climate change, or manifest realities such as pollution, they are contested with greater or lesser success by bicycle activism. This activism and this way of life shows us, finally, how environmental struggles cannot today be understood but as constant and unfinished sociopolitical processes of articulation, intersection and assemblage