Cycling & Care seminar call

Submissions for a one-day seminar dedicated to exploring the materialities, affects and public narratives around cycling as care are now open. The seminar will take place in-person in Tallinn University on September 9, 2026. Deadline for abstracts: May 13.

Call for papers

Feminist theory has advanced thinking about care and with care for decades, understanding it both as a practice that sustains life and is intertwined with virtually all aspects of life (Tronto, 1993). Following Puig de la Bellacasa (2017), understanding care as a material, concrete doing gives a strong sense of attachment and commitment that materializes it as an ethically and politically charged practice, rather than merely an affective state associated with the feminine.

Taking this understanding of care as practice as a starting point, mobility—and cycling in particular—can be examined as a site where care is enacted, negotiated and contested. Shaped by social relations, material infrastructures and cultural meanings, cycling has developed significant associations with care. By enabling individualized and collective demonstrations of responsibility to the planet, cycling has been central to environmentalist identities (Aldred, 2010; Horton, 2006; Muide, 2022). From a moral and affective perspective, cycling could be understood as a form of “caring” citizenship that is manifested through everyday practices and articulated in opposition to “toxic” automobility. At the same time, however, cyclists are frequently constructed as deviant and incompetent (Aldred, 2013), positioning them as disruptive to dominant norms of “good road citizenship” grounded in automobility.

At the policy level, cycling promotion is increasingly incorporated into cities’ climate neutrality policies and SUMPs, which call for extending available cycling infrastructure to encourage uptake across all ages and genders. In the context of cities’ net-zero transitions, Silva & Pink (2025) conceptualize care as the principal infrastructure that supports, enables, manifests in, and is sustained by everyday cycling. They emphasize the importance of the interconnected relationship between care as an affective infrastructure and the physical, material cycling infrastructures, in advancing the uptake of cycling.

Feminist transport scholarship has mainly been interested in care as unpaid labor done by humans for other humans, examining its implications on everyday mobility. The gender gap in cycling has been associated with women’s bigger care burden across different geographies, from Vancouver and Toronto (Ravensbergen et al., 2020; Sersli et al., 2020) to Bogotá and Quito (Gamble, 2024; Montoya-Robledo et al., 2020). In this literature, cycling has been found to be “at odds” with transporting children or bulky bags. Across these contexts, the lack of adequate physical and social infrastructure, alongside lived experiences of public harassment, have been identified as central factors hindering women’s vélomobilities of care. Inadequate infrastructure and safety also remain as main issues for children’s autonomy in cycling to school (Harscouët et al., 2026). At the same time, accompanying the elderly on leisurely bicycle rides has been reported to have significant benefits for their life quality (McNiel & Westphal, 2020).

Even when cycling is experienced and enacted as “caring”—whether individually or in assemblage with human and more-than-human others—different visions of care may come into conflict in the space of transit where multiple road users compete over the right to occupy space.

For this seminar, we invite critical contributions that aim at (re)defining the role of care in cycling. We are especially interested in papers focusing on, but not limited to questions such as:

·       Cycling as “careless” mobility: how is cycling framed as harmful or inconsiderate toward co-travelers, other road users, members of society, or the environment? Contributions may explore both self-perceptions and situated analyses of local mobility cultures.

·       Affective vélomobilities of care: how can explorations of the affective and emotional aspects of (co-)cycling inform more inclusive planning practices?

·       Intersectional analyses of cycling and care: how do gender, class, race, bodily abilities and income intersect in defining the feasibility of performing everyday care tasks by bicycle? To what extent is access to cycling shaped by privilege?

·       Mobility standards regarding cycling and parenting: how do expectations of “good parenting” shape modal choices and the (in)compatibility of cycling with care tasks?

·       Public narratives of cycling in the context of net zero transitions: with which means is cycling constructed as “caring” for the environment, and how can different communities of care enable cycling, especially among under-represented groups (with special interest in insights from under-researched geographical regions such as Eastern Europe and Africa).

·       Critical reading of SUMPs and urban planning policies: how can cycling promotion be careless of the needs of other human and more-than-human groups underrepresented in mobilities and urban planning? What unintended consequences—such as housing pressures, mobility inequalities, or biodiversity loss—may arise from expanding cycling infrastructure, and how can these reshape our understanding of care?

·       Creative and innovative methodologies that provide new insights into the emotional and affective aspects of co-cycling with diverse forms of companionship.

The event aims to bring together researchers working across disciplines to share and develop work in progress, with the collective goal of shaping a future special issue on cycling and care in a mobilities-oriented peer-reviewed journal.

Submissions

We are seeking abstracts that outline proposed 8,000-word journal articles. Submissions should:

• Present work that is unpublished and not currently under review elsewhere.

• Clearly describe the proposed argument, approach, and contribution of the full paper in a 300-word abstract.

• Add a 200-word biographical note about the author(s).

All documents should be sent to maria.lindmae@tlu.ee by May 13, 2026.

Participation

This seminar is designed as an interactive, discussion-based event, and participants are expected to attend at Tallinn University on September 9, 2026. We prefer in-person attendance, but online participation is possible, if travel is not feasible. Academic discussion will be paired with social and mobile activities.

Funding

Note that limited funding for travel and accommodation is available. When submitting your abstract, please indicate whether you require financial support to cover travel or accommodation costs and whether you can attend in person.

Timeline

• Abstract submission deadline: May 13, 2026

• Announcement of selected papers: May 20, 2026

• Draft paper submission (for peer feedback): September 1, 2026

• Submission of final draft for publication: TBC according to editorial guidelines

Draft papers should be sufficiently developed for presentation and peer discussion at the seminar. They do not need to be final versions but should be complete enough to allow for constructive feedback.

Outcome

The seminar is intended as a collaborative step toward developing a special issue, as well as an opportunity to socialize and strengthen the cycling studies community. During the seminar, participants will have the opportunity to give and receive feedback on their drafts and help shape a coherent collection of articles for submission to a mobilities-oriented journal. Please note that no editorial agreement has been signed yet.

Organizers

Maria Lindmäe, MSCA Research Fellow, Tallinn University

Tauri Tuvikene, Professor of Urban Studies, Tallinn University

Contact

Abstracts should be sent to maria.lindmae@tlu.ee.

References

Aldred, R. (2010). ‘On the outside’: Constructing cycling citizenship. Social & Cultural Geography, 11(1), 35-52. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360903414593

Aldred, R. (2013). Incompetent or Too Competent? Negotiating Everyday Cycling Identities in a Motor Dominated Society. Mobilities, 8(2), 252-271. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2012.696342

Gamble, J. (2024). Rearranging care while cycling under the Covid-19 pandemic in Quito, Ecuador. Gender, Place & Culture, 31(12), 1777-1796. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2024.2307592

Harscouët, P., Ferrie, C., Soltani, N., Caulfield, B., & Mölter, A. (2026). “I’m a nervous wreck when I cycle“ cycling to school with children in Ireland: Insights from parents. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 36, 101874. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2026.101874

Horton, D. (2006). Environmentalism and the bicycle. Environmental Politics, 15(1), 41-58. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644010500418712

McNiel, P., & Westphal, J. (2020). Cycling Without Age Program: The Impact for Residents in Long-Term Care. Western Journal of Nursing Research, 42(9), 728-735. https://doi.org/10.1177/0193945919885130

Montoya-Robledo, V., Montes Calero, L., Bernal Carvajal, V., Galarza Molina, D. C., Pipicano, W., Peña, A. J., Pipicano, C., López Valderrama, J. S., Fernández, M. A., Porras, I., Arias, N., & Miranda, L. (2020). Gender stereotypes affecting active mobility of care in Bogotá. Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 86, 102470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2020.102470

Muide, T. (2022). Roheliste rattaretked aastail 1988–1993 / Green Bicycle Tours in the Years 1988–1993. Methis. Studia Humaniora Estonica, 24(30), 228-235. https://doi.org/10.7592/methis.v24i30.22117

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Ravensbergen, L., Buliung, R., & Sersli, S. (2020). Vélomobilities of care in a low-cycling city. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 134, 336-347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2020.02.014

Sersli, S., Gislason, M., Scott, N., & Winters, M. (2020). Riding alone and together: Is mobility of care at odds with mothers’ bicycling? Journal of Transport Geography, 83, 102645. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2020.102645

Silva, N. de, & Pink, S. (2025). Cycling for net zero transition: Diversity, infrastructures and care. Mobilities, 25(1), 198-213. (world). https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2025.2532403

Tronto, J. (1993). Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003070672