I conduct research on mobilities, cities (& their peripheries), more-than-human natures, pragmatic sociology, environmental politics and diverse methodologies. Since I started, cycling has been both an object and vehicle for this work. A biting critique of automobility (Canada’s most elided ecological catastrophe) has ignited my research since my PhD (2012), which examines how the car reassembled Canada’s capital city.

New and emerging research: one thread in my new work revolves around interspecies mobility justice. After theorizing this idea in a 2020 Mobilities journal article, I wrote a chapter in the Global Reflections on COVID-19 and Urban Inequalities (2021) series that relates it to city cycling after the pandemic. I elaborated interspecies mobility justice further in a special issue of Active Travel Studies (2022) on longer distance cycling. A second thread, building on pragmatic sociology and my 2020 book, explores how social movements mobilize competing theories of the common good to both support and attack environmentalism. Or so I argue in a chapter, “Against Environmentalism for the Common Good: A Theoretical Model” in the Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism (2022). A third thread explores mutual relations between cycling and e-micromobilities, like electric unicycles, e-scooters and e-bikes.

Right before the pandemic, I wrote a chapter in The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society (2019) about the production of nature, elaborating how cycling, in a manner more conducive to nonhuman life than the car, can animate and produce nature. I developed this work later, in another ecologically oriented chapter, “New wilderness mobilities: Cycling against climate change, mass extinction and habitat destruction,” in Cycling Societies (2021). Around the same time, I published a statistical analysis in the Journal of Transport Geography (2020) of how regional political and cultural differences in Canada connected to fossil capitalism shape the likelihood of people connecting cycling to the common good.

I’m also interested in diverse research methodologies, including feminist regression analysis, mobile video ethnography, and film. In an article in the International Journal of Social Research Methodology (2017) I co-authored with my PhD supervisor, Dr. Janet Siltanen, we explore how regression analysis can advance feminist approaches to intersectionality. In a 2019 article in the same journal, “Calibrating the go-along for the Anthropocene,” I challenge conventional wisdom surrounding ‘go-along’ research methods to improve their sensitivity to contemporary environmental crises. This article builds on a book chapter I co-authored with Dr. Phillip Vannini on mobile urban ethnography in The Routledge Handbook of Urban Mobilities  (2020). I’m currently making a film about about cycling and mobility justice in Nova Scotia, with a focus on Dartmouth.

Publications

Books
Scott, N. Assembling Moral Mobilities: Cycling, Cities, and the Common Good, University of Nebraska Press, 2020.

Articles in Refereed Journals

Scott, N. “Longer distance cycling for interspecies justice in Canada, Active Travel Studies, 2022. PDF

Scott, N. “A political theory of interspecies mobility justice,” Mobilities, 2020. PDF

Scott, N. “Where can cycling lift the common good? Regional political culture and fossil capitalism play a role,” Journal of Transport Geography, 86, 2020. PDF

Sersli, S., M. Gislason, N. Scott, M. Winters. “Riding alone and together: Is mobility of care at odds with mothers’ bicycling?,” Journal of Transport Geography, 83, 2020.

Scott, N. “Calibrating the go-along for the Anthropocene,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2019. PDF

Sersli, S., N. Scott, M. Winters. “Effectiveness of a Bicycle Skills Training Intervention on Increasing Bicycling and Confidence: A Longitudinal Quasi-Experimental Study,” Journal of Transport & Health, 2019, 14(0).

S. Sersli, D. DeVries, M. Gislason, N. Scott, M. Winters. “Changes in bicycling frequency in children and adults after bicycle skills training: A scoping review.” Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2019, 123: 170-187.

Scott, N. and J. Siltanen. “Intersectionality and quantitative methods: assessing regression from a feminist perspective,” International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 2017, 20 (4): 373-385. PDF

Scott, N. “Cycling, Performance and the Common Good: Copenhagenizing Canada’s Capital,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 2016, 25: (1) 22-37. PDF

Scott, N. “Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle: Henri Lefebvre and the Liberation of Transportation,” Space & Culture, 2013, 16 (3): 397–410.

Scott, N. “Storied Infrastructure: Tracing Traffic, Place, and Power in Canada’s Capital City,” ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2010, 36 (1): 149-174.

Scott, N. “At the intersection of religious ritual and automobility: Pastoral care of the road,” ARC: The Journal of the Faculty of Religious Studies McGill University, 2009, 37: 149-167.

Edited Book Chapters

Scott, N. “Against Environmentalism for the Common Good: A Theoretical Model.” In (eds.) David Tindall, Mark C.J. Stoddart and Riley E. Dunlap. Handbook of Anti-Environmentalism, Edgar, 2022.

Scott, N. “City Cycling After COVID-19 for Interspecies Mobility Justice.” In (eds.) Rianne Van Melik, Pierre Filion, and Brian Doucet. Global Reflections on COVID-19 and Urban Inequalities: Volume 3: Public Space and Mobility, Bristol University Press, 2021.

Scott, N. “New wilderness mobilities: Cycling against climate change, mass extinction and habitat destruction.” In (eds.) Dennis Zuev, Katerina Psarikidou and Cosmin Popan. Cycling Societies: Innovations,  Inequalities, and Governance, Routledge, 2021. PDF

Vannini, P. and Scott, N. “Mobile ethnographies of the city.” In (eds.) Ole B. Jensen, Claus Lassen, Vincent Kaufmann, Malene Freudendal-Pedersen and Ida Sofie Gøtzsche Lange. Handbook of Urban Mobilities, Routledge, 2020.

Scott, N. “Ecologizing Lefebvre: Urban Mobilities & the Production of Nature.” In (eds.) Michael E. Leary-Owhin and John P. McCarthy, The Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, the City and Urban Society, Routledge, 2019. PDF

Scott, N. “How Car-Drivers Took the Streets: Critical Planning Moments of Automobility.” In (eds.) Phillip Vannini, Paola Jiron, Ole B. Jensen, Lucy Budd, and Christian Fisker, Technologies of Mobility in the Americas, pp. 79-98, Peter Lang Publishing, New York, 2012. PDF

Scott, N. “The Social Dynamics of Canadian Protest Participation,” In (eds.) Matthew Hayday and Marie Hammond-Callaghan, Mobilizations, Protests and Engagements: Canadian Perspectives on Social Movements, pp. 35-61, Fernwood Press, Black Point, N.S., 2008.

Research Reports

Travers, Kathleen Reed, Peter Hall, Nicholas Scott, Meghan Winters, Grace Kwan, and Kevin Park. Transportation Planning, Policy, and Electric Micro-Mobilities: A Knowledge Synthesis of Recent Publications. Simon Fraser University, SSHRC Knowledge Synthesis Grants – Mobility and Public Transit 2020. PDF

Journal Editorials

Sodero, S. and N. Scott “Contentious Mobilities,” Canadian Journal of Sociology, 2016, 41(3): 257-276.

Davidson, T. and N. Scott “Ottawa Studies,” Canadian Journal of Urban Research, 2016, 25 (1): 1-7.