Pedaling Stories: A Post-Qualitative Analysis of Changing Gears

Changing Gears is a documentary film that traces the diverse journeys of three community organizations in Canada, Nicaragua, and Uganda that use bicycles to promote gender equity and sustainable futures. Drawing from post-qualitative inquiry, we approach documentary-making as itself a form of research that moves beyond conventional qualitative methodologies to embrace the agency of film, technology, and materiality as co-constitutive forces in knowledge production. In turn, the collaborative creation process becomes a site of inquiry where human and non-human actors—cameras, bicycles, landscapes, bodies—enter intricate, dynamic relationships that generate new ways of knowing.

This is a collaborative story. Scholar and documentary filmmaker Cathy van Ingen moderates a curated dialogue among four co-authors: scholars Lyndsay Hayhurst and Brian Wilson, community leader and researcher Janet Otte, and filmmaker Keiron Cobban—weaving their written reflections into a collective narrative. Together, we explore how documentary-making functions as a processual research methodology and praxis, a “doing” that creates powerful affective encounters between fieldwork and audiences across different viewing contexts. We examine the multivocal, contradictory effects as the film travels, questioning linear notions of research dissemination.

This paper contributes to expanding more-than-human research approaches in sport and movement studies by demonstrating how collaborative filmmaking can serve as both method and outcome, challenging traditional theory/practice binaries while generating new onto-epistemological possibilities for understanding development, gender, and mobility through bicycle assemblages.