Essay examples --

The mobility paradigm proposed by John Urry (2000) brought a significant shift into the way of researching in social sciences. According to BÃ ¼scher and Urry (2009: 100), this shift allows theorize the social from the perspective of economic, social and political practices, ideologies and infrastructures. These, as reported by authors (2009: 100), engage the mobility of people, things and information. However, this radical shift in theory goes hand in hand with an inevitable need of new methods to gather sociological knowledge. We can see this need on the example of cycling as a practice of mobility. As Spinney and Brown (2009: 132) stated, the dissatisfaction with such a small range of methods that could help to explain various aspects of cycling has been rising lately. Thus, how to research on this practice of mobility to gain as much sociological knowledge as possible? The answer might be hidden within developing methodologies of sociology with emphasis on visual and sensory app roach. In this essay I will demonstrate how might be cycling investigated with the assistance of new methods that include video. Firstly, the mobility paradigm will be briefly introduced and connected with the realm of cycling. Subsequently, I will show in which ways can be video used for researching. Ultimately, the most important part of this paper will be dedicated to practice shown on examples of two different but in many ways similar investigations. The mobility paradigm, turn from analysing society to analysing mobility, was pioneered by John Urry (2000) in his book Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-First Century. The author (2000, 2007) laid the foundations of mobility paradigm and proposed a shift from research on society to ... ...nvestigation. These are participatory video, videography and video elicitation. Accordingly, on an example of video use in sociological research practice we have demonstrated benefits and tried to find drawbacks of this methodology. When researching on cycling, we might encounter various obstacles. For instance, the terrain will not let the researcher to follow the participant and conduct uninterrupted interview in real time. By using of mobile video camera enables to experience and understand various practices (In our case cycling.) that would not be possible to approach and brings a new perspective into contemporary research. Moreover, use of representations allows researchers to produce knowledges that are hard to describe with language. Finally, we can clearly see from our evidence that video bridges the gap between the embodiment of practice and the language.