‘Provoking responsibility’: The struggle for recognition as an everyday cyclist in Dublin City

Abstract

In this paper, I present how cyclists in Dublin engage in a process of provoking responsibility in their interactions with other mobile subjects as means of dealing with conditions of precarious entitlement to public space. I begin the paper with an exploration of the extant literature relating to cycling, citizenship and public space, arguing that provoking responsibility can add to such literature on individual and collective cycling mobilities in that it conceptualises how cyclists engage in an individual, everyday struggle for recognition as a legitimate public space user amidst the sharing of public space with differently mobile subjects. Next, I detail the grounded theory methodology, study context (Dublin, Ireland), means of data collection (qualitative interviews), interviewee sample, and ‘precarious entitlement theory’. Following this, I posit the category of ‘precarious entitlement’ to public space – the main concern of utility cyclists in Dublin – and conceptually outline provoking responsibility as a process of dealing with conditions of precarious entitlement, using illustrations from qualitative interviews with cyclists. I include in this outline the key modes of provoking responsibility: accentuating presence, asserting entitlement, indicating transgression, punishing transgression, and displaying responsibility. I conclude that provoking responsibility shows how cyclists can engage in everyday, mobile practices of citizenship in the name of recognition of spatial entitlements and equal status within public space without collective mobilisation; moreover, the category depicts how cyclists engage in not only multisensory practices but also multisensory provocation in their interactions with co-present mobile subjects as means of being recognised and respected.