Rethinking 'interdisciplinarity' for cycling scholarship

This paper rethinks the concept of interdisciplinarity for cycling scholarship. Integrating critical insights from foundational research on interdisciplinary research as such (e.g., Klein, 1990; Pedersen, 2016), we unpack key challenges and opportunities of interdisciplinarity for cycling-related research. Cycling scholarship intersects with numerous established research domains (e.g., urban mobility, public health, infrastructure, and policy), and researchers such as Pucher et al. (2010) and Saelens et al. (2003) have demonstrated the value of integrating insights across disciplines. However, much existing cycling research remains predominantly "cross-disciplinary" (cf. Keestra et al, 2022), and focuses on advancing domain-specific goals by combining closely aligned methodologies, often targeting immediate and applied outcomes. In exploring ways to supplement such approaches, we advocate for an expansive, critically reflective interdisciplinarity aimed at foundational, exploratory insights with longer-term transformative potential. For example, recent scholarship has emphasised the importance of better understanding cycling as a complex, multidimensional phenomenon (e.g., Popan, 2019).
This requires a breaking-open of established categories to create space for dynamic and fluid intellectual exchanges – an “undisciplining” of knowledge (Graff, 2015) that holds both risk and reward. In envisioning fundamentally interdisciplinary perspectives for cycling scholarship, we draw inspiration from humanities scholarship, which has a long history of rethinking diverse theoretical and methodological approaches. As we argue, humanities-informed interdisciplinarity can be particularly useful for exploring areas that can remain under-examined in conventional applied research, such as the engangled social, political, and cultural dimensions of human activities and behaviours related to cycling (Robinson et al, 2016). Insights regarding these dimensions can then be brought to bear on research questions and objectives across many discrete disciplinary contexts.
In recognising the inherent practical and conceptual challenges of interdisciplinarity, we propose cycling itself as an anchoring concept that can facilitate boundary-crossing work. In other words, where differing research agendas, strategic plans, or funding mandates may make it difficult to find common ground in interdisciplinary research efforts, cycling itself can function as an interface that frames generative interplay between diverse theoretical frameworks, conceptual approaches, and methodologies. Ultimately, by critically rethinking foundational scholarship, we want to propose a vision for interdisciplinary cycling scholarship that can better embrace methodological diversity, epistemological reflexivity, and transformative, impactful research questions.