The Future of Rickshaws

Abstract

The contributions to this special section, together with the Introduction, serve a valuable role in bringing to attention a frequently overlooked mobility practice. Particularly welcome is the presence of scholarship from local perspectives within the Western academic context. Between them, these papers begin to put fl esh on what is all too easily framed from European perspectives as an exotic practice of the “other.” Yet it is this very possibility of “strangeness” that should alert us to a number of important issues for further consideration. My own perspective here is as an interdisciplinary scholar, working day to day as a sociologist and a researcher into cycling practices, both historical and contemporary. Th e considerations range between the conceptual and practical, the historical past and the imagined future.