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The working conditions of professional skateboarders are rarely investigated in academic literature or traditional skate media (e.g., Thrasher Magazine). This article contextualizes skateboarding labor and compares its professionals with other freelance contractors in the precarious neoliberal economy. It also explores the role of social media in skateboarders' careers; while experiencing data mining and the fetishism of digital devices like any other online user, pro skaters must adopt platforms (e.g., YouTube) for their career advancement, as greater notoriety leads to corporate sponsorships. I outline the multiple hats that skaters wear, such as the sponsored athlete, the walking advertisement, and most importantly the emerging social-media adept. Within this context, the article further details the coercive forces keeping skaters amenable to sponsoring companies and industry insiders, such as the pejorative label of "kook." Finally, I explain a contradiction that the profusion of Web 2.0 use has led to slight but not proportional coverage of skaters' working conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skateboarding will be included in the 2020 Olympics, representing a new crescendo of the activity's "sportification." Although some celebrate increased exposure and legitimacy, others bemoan the incursion of outsiders. Nonetheless, it is widely believed that women in particular have much to gain from the Olympic inclusion. This article begins by summarizing the literature on women's marginalization and exclusion and then diagnoses a gendered paradox (and two associated double binds) related to sportification. Based on confidential interviews with some of the top-level female skateboarders in the world, it suggests that women are less ambivalent about elite competition due to their subcultural experiences. Overall, it argues that sportification should not be adopted uncritically or as an inevitable process, and that scholars ought to take critiques of elite competition seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neoliberal urbanism often draws critiques because it privatizes public space and excludes specific social groups whose interests are not in line with the development goals of local states and corporations. This article, through an exploration of the politics and discourses of urban skateboarding, suggests that this clear distinction, between entrepreneurialism and community–based place making, may fail to explain transformative changes occurring in public space today. Comparing two grassroots activist campaigns at the Brooklyn Banks in New York City (NYC) and West LA Courthouse in the city of Los Angeles (LA), this article explains the ways in which skateboarders leverage specific neoliberal ideologies to claim their right to these two settings. In both cases, skateboarders save spaces through entrepreneurial urban means that bolster neoliberal values while retaining the tactical nature of their activities. Although both activist movements pursue the common values of authenticity, entrepreneurship, and private funding, they employ different discourses to reclaim public space. The NYC skaters frame a security discourse, which ultimately limits their continual access to the Brooklyn Banks. The LA skate community, on the contrary, constructs a spontaneity discourse, characterized by creativity, conviviality, and civil society, successfully transforming the West LA Courthouse into a legalized skate plaza. Our findings suggest that skateboarding communities and their spatial activism are resilient enough to articulate different rationales and successfully fight to transform public spaces into urban commons. However, we argue that 'the discourses' matter significantly in the processes and outcomes of activist mobilizations occurring within neoliberalizing public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we draw from and develop existing ideas of spatial desire and emplacement to explore skateboarders' skilful mobility and perceptive competence. By combining findings from Swedish and Danish ethnographic studies, we illustrate how skateboarders imagine and make new material encounters both in urban environments not originally built for skateboarding and in skateparks. These imaginations and makings include memories of previous material encounters and are a part of ongoing social negotiations, but they also have a component of imaginary novelty. Making and imagining are discussed as materialization and formation, which include the idea of active materials and sentient practitioners. Two types of material encounters were imagined and made: transitions and smooth lines. Subsequently, two characteristics of these types of encounters were described: "kind" and challenging. The processes of imagination and making took a mutual understanding for granted and deeply engaged the body in the ever-changing material environment. We argue that a conceptualization of spatial desire as emplaced and highly imaginable is fruitful for research on skateboarding and other movement cultures where engagements with materials come to the fore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skateboarding poses a unique case study for considering the place of sport in human activity. The bulk of skateboarding scholarship argues that skateboarding is largely a subversion of rule governance, a view difficult to square with common and popular rule-governed skateboarding competitions, now including the Olympics. We attempt to resolve this tension by arguing for a kind of pluralism: skateboarding’s engagement in rule-governed competition is distinctly subversive, yielding the claim that skateboarding is both sport and subversion. This pluralism is examined in an “ecological” framework of emergent activities defined by push-pull interactive relationships between skateboarders and their environment that change the meaning of their spaces—whether domestic, urban, or competitive—to spaces that are both wild and spontaneous. We conclude with reflections on how skateboarding provides understanding of sport in the space of ecological meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of East Asia to the skateboard industry is multifaceted. It represents a dense commercial asset where the “cool” of skateboarding can be leveraged for consumption. It is also a global resource for touring professional skateboarders visiting countries such as China, Korea, and Japan to film and photograph their tricks in new locations. The success of such strategies are entwined with a regional network of skateboarders, a group whose subcultural capital is operationalized through network capital. Analysis of these connections highlights that Hong Kong’s prominence in East Asian skateboarding is largely dependent on its position as a global city and hybrid entrepôt. By addressing the conservative culture of skateboarding, and the importance of Hong Kong as a global city rather than a “skateable” city, this article further contributes to the theorizing of skateboarding beyond discussions of space and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skateboarding has a global reach and will be included for the first time in the 2020 Olympic Games. It has transformed from a subcultural pursuit to a mainstream and popular sport. This research looks at some of the challenges posed by the opening of a new skatepark in Hong Kong and the introduction of a mandatory helmet rule. It explores attitudes to helmets in skateboard media, the local government, and among the skateboarders who use the new skatepark. It argues that helmet use is not only an issue of safety but also an issue of control. From the skateboarders’ perspective, it is about participant control over their sport, and from a government perspective, it is about accountability. The contrast between the two approaches is explored through the concepts of edgework and audit culture. As skateboarding continues to become a mainstream sporting activity, such issues of control will prove to be more relevant and must be negotiated in partnership. The growth in new skateparks, many of which are concrete, underlines the need for this discussion. It is argued that helmet use will continue to be a site of conflict as skateboarding becomes further incorporated into a mainstream sport, and that how helmets are represented in skateboarding will come to indicate who has control over the sport. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]