Comment: This wide-ranging book on cycling is available as a free download from the University of Adelaide Press website https://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/ Edited by Jennifer Bonham and Marilyn Johnson (2015), it offers both a comprehensive overview of the “state of play” on the current engagement with cycling together with chapters on strategies for and processes of change. The latter, as the book jacket declares, reflects “different ontological positions”. I will mention a few chapters that pursue a poststructural perspective.

Chapter 9 [“Gender and cycling: Gendering cycling subjects and forming bikes, practices and spaces as gendered objects”], to which I contributed, applies Poststructural Interview Analysis (Bonham and Bacchi 2016, in Bacchi and Goodwin, Poststructural Policy Analysis, pp. 113-121; see Question 8 in FAQ) to interview texts from a study conducted by Bonham into “Women Returning to Cycling”. The chapter focuses on how, through a poststructural analysis of interview texts, we can understand the processes through which “women” and “men” come to be marked as distinctive categories, processes described as gendering. On the various meanings of gendering in feminist analyses, with a particular emphasis on how it is used in this chapter to describe the “making” of “men” and “women”, see Bacchi, C. (2017). “Policies as Gendering Practices: Re-Viewing Categorical Distinctions”. Journal of Women, Politics and Policy, 38(1): 20-41.

Chapter 11 [“More than a message: Producing cyclists through public safety advertising campaigns”] by Rachael Nielsen and Jennifer Bonham applies WPR to a road safety campaign screened by the South Australian Motor Accident Commission (MAC) between 2010 and 2014. The authors show how the ads in this campaign inadvertently normalized motoring and how “traffic” and “cycling” are formed as objects for thought within a multiplicity of discursive practices. On this topic see Bacchi, C. & Bonham, M. (2014). “Reclaiming discursive practices as an analytic focus”, Foucault Studies, 17 (March): 173-192.

Chapter 10 [“Making (up) the child cyclist: Bike Ed in South Australia”] by Anne Wilson brings a Foucauldian analytic lens to a 2012 South Australian bicycle education course. Wilson shows how the program and its practices tended to shape “the child” as responsible for its own safety and to reinforce the norms of automobile culture.