Cycling as Embodied Spatial Research Practice (CESRP)
Abstract
Qualitative methods in spatial research require one to understand the place as much as the subject and subjectivities of the study. Cycling as embodied spatial research practice (CESRP) is based on the embodied practice of exploring,locating, dismissing; andis about being accessible, being vulnerable, being sensitized, and being receptive to familiarity or hostility that may affect the researcher and the research.CESRPallows not only developing sensitivity through immersion but also allows an equanimous reading of space and place through demanding the researchers’ express attention. In qualitative research, it builds on the ecologically grounded practices of transect walks, and the sociological practice of ethnography, primarily by placing the element of arrival within the scope of reflexive research action. It advocates adaptive entanglement through bodily engagement toreflectonthe researcher’s positionality along with the empirical action of data collection. It builds on previous work on the subject to present the arrival and selection of spatial research sites as a qualitative process in itself. Through reflecting on our own field experiences, this paper establishes how CESRP could be an inductive tool for the fieldwork researcher who often arrives as an outsider in the study area.
Introduction
Qualitative research is a reflexive practice requiring the researcher to not only develop sensitivity to the research area but also reflexivity to one’s own positionality (Charmaz & Thornberg, 2021). With increased emphasis on grounded fieldwork in spatial research, this paper follows the likes of Rubber Boots Methods for the Anthropocene (Andersen et al., 2022.) and Walking as a Research Practice (Twemlow et al., 2022) which promote an expressive research practice in order to develop critical methods beyond scientific empiricism, that move from a preformed framework of research to an open performative practice. “In good fieldwork, one must open oneself to the curiosities of others and allow them to alter one’s own” (Swanson, 2020, 16; Andersen et al., 2022, 121). These curiosities extend to more-than-human inputs that one’s body is receptive to, and which can be lived, read,capturedand analyzed only through bodily involvement. More than the spoken word, the ambient sounds that volumize, the scents that signify spaces, and the atmosphere that fills in with social action, are elements that only a body can record. These are the elements that CESRP wishes to capture. As Spinney (2009) queries the sensory aspect of mobility “for research to focus on the ‘immaterial’ embodied and sensory aspects of mobility that have previously been neglected or marginalised.” CESRP insists on the action of arrival as primary to the practice.
While cycling has been the instrument for all of our spatial research, we focus on our experience ofthree months on field in Kashmirfor documentation carried outunderthe Endangered Material Knowledge Program (EMKP). Cycling afforded us a wider understanding of the context, and in turn, of the practice we were documenting. While the mental and physical benefits of cycling are already known (Oja et.al. 2011, Götchi et.al. 2016, Garrard et.al. 2021) we look at our experience and reflect on whatincorporating cyclingmeans to research methods and observations.
Methodology
Our field research for the EMKP project began in October 2024 and was to be conducted in and around the Dal lake in Srinagar, Kashmir. Pre-field work investigation had indicated that we would have to locate ourselves where boat building could be in process – in the backwaters of the Dal, as there was no sign of work on the government constructed boat yards. This likely meant days of exploration around the lake which has a perimeter of 15.5 km, and we arrived at the decision to use the bicycle quite deductively.
Boat building was possibly happening in areas that were away from tourist presence, meaning the old parts of the city characterized by narrow alleyways. Combing through these in a car would have been impossible. While using a motorbike would have overcome this particular issue,

having to cross water at times would have necessitated leaving behind the motorbike, rendering us without transport on the opposite side or on islands inside. Additionally, we were carrying a substantial amount of equipment. Our set-up included two cameras, three lenses, mics, spare batteries, a drone, a laptop, and two tripods, along with food and water for the day. Walking with all this in backpacks would have been a highly exhausting and inefficient method of exploring the area. Cycling, then, was the only solution.

Findings & learnings
Immersion
While travelling by car, speed and encapsulation create a virtual divide between the observer and the observed, and it is this divide that lies at the base of several dualisms. Cycling, in its slowness and openness, immerses one into the inescapable reality of the context. In Srinagar, we rode through three-feetwide alleys, pushed over rickety footbridges, clambered down steep riverbanks, and hauled them into boats to travel across the water. We navigated through prime- time traffic in the old city without getting stuck in jams and passed through heavily secured areas without being subjected to vehicle checks. As we sieved the city for possible sites of study on our bicycles, the pace seemed perfect. The pace to observe people, actions and scenarios from within. We stopped multiple times to ask for assistance from locals explaining what we were lookingfor, andthey often led us along pedestrian paths to locations inaccessible on a motorized vehicle.
As Twemlow et al (2022, pg 13) write, “The body that gets cold, sweaty, thirsty, or blistered. The body that encompasses feelings, emotions, prejudices, as well as intellect…as yet unparalleled in its potential for the sensing, sifting, and assimilation of data.” Cycling allows an awareness of the geography of the context in a way unlike any other. The speed and comfort of travel on a motorized vehicle make it difficult to feel the gradient of the land, the effect of the sun and rain, the softness of the soil, the presence of the surrounding flora and fauna. Cycling leads to an automatic mapping of gradients, natural landmarks, pathways, and availability of resources around the site. Through bodily experience, it gathers information about distances, ease of material transport, and ecology of the context.
Neuroscientist Gallese (2009) commits this bodily engagement to a unity between nature and culture. In practicing cycling for spatial research, we enable the body to communicate through a practice that isessentially sensoryeven if the research grounding is initially conceived theoretically.
“aimsto overcome the dichotomies of subject/object, mind/bodyand individual/society. In practice theory, “subjects or agents are not viewed as prior to practices, but rather as the product of them; subjects exist only within the execution of social practices. […] The individual subject in practice theory is not conceivable without the body.”- (Gallese, 2020)
The overcoming of this divide is through the grounding of such thought, through the body that tethers it to space. It is essentially a practice of resolution between such binaries between subjectivities and objectivities that the subject and object cease to exist.
Arrival
Through their work Walking As a Research Practice (WARP), Twemlow et. al. (2022) perform a clear appraisal of the performative action. Yet while walking is perfectly suited for a certain scale, it has the limitation of arriving. InWARPone arrives objectively at a place of such performance. CESRP has the added advantage that it makes the arrival and the selection of the performative action of research also a variable operative. The scale and extent of every site may vary, but qualitative work requires a site of deep drilling, of careful empirical consideration before a place is qualified and selected for the research. This is not a linear operation of selection based on the researcher’s preconceived ideas. It involves the feedback from the place, of speaking to persons, of relating, of feeling the comfort or the hostility of the place.
Our first few days of fieldwork consisted of extensive exploration as we familiarized ourselves with the research context. A week into the field visit we were still looking for an active

construction site. Everyone we met attested to the absence of any new boat being built, deterred bytheexistingbanonhouseboatconstruction. Aftersevendaysofmeetingvariousstakeholders from the Dal, we fanned out towards Nigeen lake. Riding along the road circumscribing the lake, we began enquiring with the locals at points nearest to the water. The faint scent of burning pine wood mingled with that of water weeds suggested that construction activity might be taking place nearby. As we slowed down to ensure that we did not overlook any signs of ongoing work, we saw two men chatting at a tea house and decided to approach them. At thatseemingly serendipitous enquiry – but one that was most likely guided by our embodied experience – one of them said, “Yes, we are just taking a break from the site, my brother is getting a new boat constructed.” We learnt that his boat was gutted in a fire in 2022 along with six other boats (ref) and had received express permission from the high court to rebuild them. Although they had official sanction, wishing to avoid media attention, they were building in a secluded area of the lakeshore.

At this site, we were fortunate to capture an important ceremony of the completed hull being pushed into the water. This ceremony seldom takes place anymore as the government boatyards on both lakes are equipped with sluice gates. We would have missed this site entirely had we not been cycling.

Value of work

Beyond empirical reading, CESRP also introduces the idea of value of work, especially where manual work and knowledge of bodily practice is to be recorded. The physical effort of arrival that the researcher puts in through CESRP bridges the separation between the bodily practice of theparticipantand assumed intellectual practice of theresearcher. As the researcher pre- weathers the context,climateand sociality before the arrival at site,the arrival places their faculties into rather than onto the site. This pre-weathering is also observed by the participants in the research context, and the researcher’s effort of arrival places them beyond the observatory divide to gaingreater acceptance within the environment.Such acceptance is not limited to humans but extends to multi-species correspondence in which the instrument becomes the first interlocutor, opening up space to the researcher.

Additionally, in fields like construction dominated by gender disparity, women are often considered incapable of understanding technicalities of work on site, more so in traditional societies. Arriving on a cycle breaks this frame. The action signals the physical capability of the female cyclist being at par with her male co-workers. A woman’s lugging of equipment on the bicycle, carrying the cycle when required, and repairing it in case of breakdowns becomes an act of resistance against traditional assumptions of her capabilities, which correspondingly lead to a changed perception of her capabilities on site.

Vulnerability

The vulnerability of CESRP to weather events i.e. rain, snow and heat, to ecological events – i.e. rockfall, landslides and snowmelt, and sociological events i.e. strikes, festivals and protest marches etc. deeply roots the understanding of being in it rather than observing from the outside. The vulnerability lays one bare to the research environment, making it accessible and while making one’s own self and the research accessible by all influences of the context. In Srinagar, cycling meant that we were conspicuous as outsiders in the area. We had more eyes on us and were often recognized by people who had seen us in a different part of the city on our bicycles. In a place like Kashmir where foreign private vehicles could be seen warily by conflicting sides as liabilities, the bicycle in its unbecoming and somewhat vulnerable nature seldom raised such security doubts. While we did not pick sides in the political conflict, we were made aware that locals and security forces had both noticed us through such open transportation.

With CESRP the researcher still goes in with a plan, but with the high sensitivity of the medium of measurement (i.e. the body), changes are expected and accepted easily. In the possibility of taking public transport by loading the bike on the roof and alighting wherever is necessary, and in

accessing places that no motorized vehicles can go, sometimes the bike carries the researcher and many times the researcher carries the bike. To be free enough to take one’s own decision of independentmovement yetbe connected enough to know the bodily origin of one’s own knowledge deepens understanding of the positional nature of reality. Rebecca Solnit (2002; Twemlow et. al. 2022, pg. 31) questions, “Is such stimulation of the senses activated by the action? or the action demanded by such an activation of senses? One can’t tell”. The seeming serendipity of finding just the right artifacts, and just the right people through such a performative practice cannot be underscored.

Conclusion

For ethnographic spatial research, immersion in the context is of paramount importance. Cycling, through its measured pace andits effect ofheighteningof thesensesoffers an instrumentation to achieve gradual immersion into the research context. It facilitates a daily acknowledgement of the physicality of the site that results in an embodied familiarity with the research environment. CESRP enables real-time granular feedback that is certain to be missed when arriving in a motorized vehicle. This feedback is often instrumental in identifying an appropriate research site in the larger context. Additionally, in field research where one usually arrives as an outsider to novel epistemologies, the process of arrival itself has the potential to establish or dismantle boundaries and binaries. Through demonstrating the physical work contributed by the researcher, cycling has the potential to dismember the binary of intellectual and manual work. By effectively destructuring this binary, the researcher gains easier acceptance into the research environment. The visibility of the researcher also means that while observing, they are being observed beyond the immediate site environs. This acknowledging andbeing acknowledged byspatialitiesandsocialitiesbeyond the site, this vulnerability, contributes to the researcher’s presence in the site than on it, essential in qualitative spatial research where the spacing of data is as critical as the data itself.