Discourses of Cycling, Road Users and Sustainability

"Read this book if you’d like to know why cycling is not promoted enough, in spite of all the evidence we already have on how beneficial it is. It’s about the language." --Esther Anaya Boig, Imperial College London, UK
"As a transport mode, cycling has many benefits and yet is in many countries bedevilled by stigma and stereotyping. This makes it a fruitful topic for critical discourse analysis, as in this fascinating discussion of documents ranging from European policy papers to newspaper articles on a road traffic collision." --Rachel Aldred, University of Westminster, UK

This book employs a Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) framework to examine cycling mobility, marking a new turn in ecolinguistic discourse analysis. The author focuses specifically on environment-related arguments concerning the promotion of higher levels of cycling, mainly as a means of transport, and investigates the “US vs. “THEM” narratives present in many discourses about road users. Analysing newspaper articles, institutional documents and spoken interviews, the author searches for a positive new discourse that would inspire and encourage cycling as a habitual means of transport, rather than simply exposing ecologically destructive discourse. The book will be of interest to discourse and ecolingusitics scholars, as well as contributing to the lively debate about how to increase cycling in fields such as sustainability, sociology, transport planning and management.
M. Cristina Caimotto is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics and Translation at the University of Turin, Italy. Her research interests include political discourse and environmental discourse, with a focus on ideology. She is also a cycling advocate.