illustrate [verb; from the Latin in (upon) + lustrare (illuminate)]: 1) to explain or show, using examples, images, and graphics; 2) to serve as an example of; 3) to create pictures of something.

In this site, the three aspects of this definition are expressed through an eclectic variety of illustrations and illuminations, among them:

• explanations of bicycle culture and politics, through reports and musings on periodic anthropological fieldwork and archival research in different locations

• examples of the role of bicycles in social change, from the late-nineteenth century to the present

• drawings of these themes rendered through comics, including research-based comics

Grounded in the empiricism of cultural anthropology and history, nurtured by imagination, my dual goal is to help us see the bicycle with fresh eyes—as a transformative and multidimensional object that melds machine, body, motion, spirit, and social relationship—and social research as a space of creative possibility grounded in visuality and artistic expression. Some of us doing this work call it "comics-based research.”