Every quarter I post links to the most recent research into motorcycle culture, subcultures, clothing and identity, along with the biggest events in the motorcycling calendar. Here’s what caught my eye this quarter.
11th IJMS Conference, University of Nottingham
25-28 July, University Park campus. IJMS’s 11th annual conference, hosted in the UK for the first time in several years. Conference programme covered the usual breadth: intersectional identity, clothing and textiles, design history, gender, philosophy of riding. The decision to base the 2025 conference in Iceland was announced here.
https://motorcyclestudies.org/volume-20-2024/11th-ijms-conference/
Desert Island Motorcycle Books
Paul d’Orleans in The Vintagent, 29 September. A canon-shaping piece — d’Orleans picks the books he’d want to be stranded with, with substantive notes on each. Useful as a reading list for anyone trying to assemble the shelf of motorcycle cultural writing that matters; the list spans Pirsig, Lyon, Robert Hughes, Ted Simon and others. The Vintagent is itself the closest thing motorcycle culture has to a long-running critical magazine.
https://thevintagent.com/2024/09/29/desert-island-motorcycle-books/
Sturgis 84th Annual Motorcycle Rally
Black Hills, 2-11 August 2024. The 84th edition; one of the last large rallies before the 85th-anniversary blow-out in 2025. South Dakota DoT figures put attendance around 433,000 vehicles. Less of a cultural marker than the 85th would be the following year, but still the largest single gathering in motorcycling.
https://www.sturgismotorcyclerally.com/
See also EICMA’s 82nd edition in November 2025 and the 12th IJMS conference in Iceland in July 2025.
That’s it for this quarter. If you’ve come across research I’ve missed, feel free to email me.