Search

This paper investigates the historical prohibition of skateboarding in Norway from 1977 to 1989, a unique instance of such a comprehensive ban globally. The study aims to understand the circumstances leading to this ban and the rationale behind it. Two primary explanations emerged around the ban: one from a bureaucratic perspective citing risk management, and the other from skateboarders seeing it as a regulation of their counterculture. We argue that neither narrative alone is sufficient, proposing instead that other mechanisms were at play. Firstly, the ban was the inaugural case under the newly enacted Product Control Act, which was initially designed to address environmental issues. The State Pollution Control Authority found itself ill-prepared to handle the new responsibilities inherent in product control, resulting in diffuse responsibilities across several agencies. Secondly, the ambiguous categorization of skateboards as toys rather than sports equipment influenced the decision to enact the ban. The timing of the skateboard phenomenon coincided with the passing of the Product Control Act, suggesting a case of a solution seeking a problem. In conclusion, we posit that the skateboard ban resulted from a complex interplay of factors, including novel legislation, ambiguous responsibilities, cultural categorizations, and coincidental timing, rather than being solely a response to risk management or counterculture curtailment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pollution makes some leisure activities not only possible but pleasurable, an analysis known as "polluted leisure." In this paper, I extend this analysis with case examples of leisure participants adept use of polluted spaces. This adept use suggests that some leisure participants are "enskiled" at polluted leisure, possessing an embodied ecological familiarity with polluted spaces similar to a sailor who has a real knack for getting their sea legs. I present a case example of skateboarders building formal and informal skateparks on remediated Superfund sites and brownfields to further encourage this notion of polluted leisure enskilment. I then develop this notion of polluted leisure enskilment using Guattari's "ecosophy," a way of being most suitable for our Anthropocene age, claiming that skateboarding's esthetic enmeshed in polluted space offers a lived ecosophy. I conclude with potential extensions of this research in leisure studies, spatial justice, and skate studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we apply philosophical and sociological theory to consider how young women skateboarders interact with and are affected by performative aspects of skateboarding cultures. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study of three skateparks plus other skate spaces in and around two English cities, we argue that these spaces are performative in nature and that this is frequently problematic for young woman skateboarders. We suggest that, due to their comparative rarity in these spaces, young women are put under an immediate spotlight on entry, with an expectation that they perform a competent skateboarder identity while under scrutiny from other users of the space; we examine their experiences of this. We conclude by suggesting ways that skateparks and skatespaces can be designed and used to make them more accessible to woman and girl skaters, and to other groups marginalised in skateboarding cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Academy award-winning documentary short Learning to skateboard in a war zone (if you're a girl) (2019), which depicts girl participants at a skating facility in Kabul, Afghanistan, run by Skateistan, a sports nongovernmental organisation (NGO), until the Taliban returned in 2021. The article uses the film as a case study for a research project interrogating a recent trend in documentary production, namely films seeking to disassemble established gender, class, race, ableist and ageist norms in the representation of action and lifestyle sport participation and performance, in this instance by tapping into contemporaneous discourses of empowered girlhood prevalent in the US. Looking at the distinctive production contexts that shaped Learning to skakeboard, and at key sequences of the film, the article shows why and how it offers a striking counterpoint to the panoply of skateboarding documentaries that overwhelmingly represent risk-taking young white Western men, and which work powerfully to shape the associations and meanings of the pursuit. As we watch Afghan girls learning skate tricks, Learning to skateboard foregrounds the dynamics of performance, and its viewing, in ways that implicitly critique what kinds of bodies are most typically seen in play and in peril in action and lifestyle sports documentaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skateboarding is a masculine-inflected, male dominated informal lifestyle sport which carries inherent risk of pain and injury, which is expected to be met with stoicism as part of claiming 'authentic' skateboarder identity. We examine young women skateboarders' attitudes to these risks, focusing on how they understand, minimise and cope with injury and pain as an ongoing accompaniment to skateboarding practice. We consider how they see injury and pain in relationship to learning and at times experience muscle and injury pain as positive. We conclude that, while young women seem to be taking on the masculinist attitudes to risk, pain and injury that characterise skateboarding as a community of practice, there is some evidence of resistance to this. We also note that the apparent preference of many UK-based young women skateboarders for transition skateparks, due to problems encountered in street spaces, may make them more susceptible to serious injury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common theory of motor control posits that movement is controlled by muscle synergies. However, the behavior of these synergies during highly complex movements remains largely unexplored. Skateboarding is a hardly researched sport that requires rapid motor control to perform tricks. The objectives of this study were to investigate three key areas: (i) whether motor complexity differs between skateboard tricks, (ii) the inter-participant variability in synergies, and (iii) whether synergies are shared between different tricks. Electromyography data from eight muscles per leg were collected from seven experienced skateboarders performing three different tricks (Ollie, Kickflip, 360°-flip). Synergies were extracted using non-negative matrix factorization. The number of synergies (NoS) was determined using two criteria based on the total variance accounted for (tVAF > 90% and adding an additional synergy does not increase tVAF > 1%). In summary: (i) NoS and tVAF did not significantly differ between tricks, indicating similar motor complexity. (ii) High inter-participant variability exists across participants, potentially caused by the low number of constraints given to perform the tricks. (iii) Shared synergies were observed in every comparison of two tricks. Furthermore, each participant exhibited at least one synergy vector, which corresponds to the fundamental 'jumping' task, that was shared through all three tricks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In cities around the world, skateboarders repair surfaces and objects for the purposes of play using techniques to fill, smooth, and fabricate. Research in social and cultural geography focuses on the ways citizens repair and care for material objects using do‐it‐yourself (DIY) practices. Despite continuities, repair work by skateboarders does not strive to improve neglected, absent, or dysfunctional infrastructure for the common good, as in cases from literature on DIY urbanism, nor to subvert objects, texts, and surfaces to make political statements, as in cases from literature on tactical urbanism. Skateboarders do repair and care work to prepare surfaces for playful damage benefitting other skaters and onlookers enjoying the spectacle. By exploring these widespread but under‐researched acts of repair and care and the circuits of knowledge that reproduce them, this paper makes four arguments. First, skateboarders do repair and care work to generate 'spots' for skateboarding from assemblages of objects and surfaces intended for other purposes. Transforming spots brings otherwise mundane patches of the city to life through thousands of tiny acts of repair and care. Second, repair and care work by skateboarders is most effective when barely visible to people outside the culture. However, repaired surfaces make their way to large audiences, often millions of viewers, through skateboard photography and video, giving some of them an outsized life across time and space. Third, knowledge about techniques of repair and care are considered an important part of skate culture to be learned and shared. Protocols of care shape acceptable degrees of modification to surfaces and objects, and as skateboarding globalises so too do these protocols. Fourth, acts of repair and care have no guarantees of longevity. Hours of labour can be destroyed by direct acts to stop skateboarding and by indirect acts emanating from dynamics of urban change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Shared-use paths (SUPs) are rapidly growing in popularity worldwide as dedicated off-street paths that are shared by non-motorists. SUPS are becoming popular for pedestrians, inline skaters, roller skaters, skateboarders, wheelchair users, and electric bicycle riders, among others. SUPs can be built alongside or far from the roadway, with the former typically separated from vehicular traffic by a buffer. SUPs built off of roadways pose a lower risk of conflict with vehicular traffic. Given the crucial role of safety in SUP utilization, this study provides a targeted review of the existing literature and state of practice focusing on the implementation of the SUPs and design guidelines as well as factors, data, and approaches to estimate SUP user volume. The findings of this study will be helpful for transportation planners and policymakers with the planning, design, implementation, and evaluation of SUPs. Ultimately, this review aims to encourage the development of safer and more accessible SUPs, enabling a broader range of non-motorists to benefit from these essential infrastructure investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research has demonstrated that male adults and youth engaged in skateboarding at community skateparks achieve heart rates that meet or exceed recommendations for exercise by the CDC. However, these studies do not adequately evaluate other non-traditional or ethnically diverse users who may differ in how they utilize the skatepark and in their cardiovascular response. The purpose of this experiment was to measure heart rate response and locomotor movement in three lesser studied groups that frequently utilize community skateparks, and to compare these results with those reported previously in male adult and youth skateboarders. Fifty-six skatepark users were analyzed, including thirty female and BIPOC skateboarders, and twenty-six non-skateboard users. All participants were instrumented with a HR monitor with GPS capability and asked to engage in their preferred activity with no duration specified. Average heart rate and time spent at high and moderate levels of heart rate intensity were not statistically different among the groups studied here, nor were they different from those reported previously for male adult and youth skateboarders. Distances traveled, average, and peak velocities were also not statistically different among the groups studied here, but all were significantly lower than values previously reported for adult male skateboarders. While some differences in distances traveled and velocity were noted, all groups met or exceeded CDC guidelines for cardiovascular fitness. These data suggest that skateparks can help a community achieve health outcomes, particularly among diverse users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to identify sponsorship-fit profiles of individuals regarding perception of sponsors of national volleyball teams in three countries and its effect on affective outcomes. We examined: (a) if sponsorship-fit profiles were similar for two sponsor categories (sport equipment/apparel companies and financial service companies) and in three countries (France, Iran and Russia); (b) whether individuals with distinct sponsorship-fit profiles differed in their attitudes toward sponsor and toward brand, (c) whether the relationships between sponsorship-fit profiles and attitudes toward sponsor and brand were similar between the two sponsor categories and the three countries; and (d) whether the scores of fit and attitude toward sponsors and brands differed across cultures and categories of sponsors. To investigate this, we collected data from 166 randomly selected student in France, 270 in Iran and 168 in Russia. The results of the cluster analyses revealed two or three sponsorship-fit profiles across the sponsor categories and countries: low, medium and high fit. Respondents had significantly different scores of fit and attitude toward sponsor and brand for the different sponsor categories and countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the enmeshment of skateboarding and pollution from an ethnographic perspective. It advances recent scholarship on “polluted leisure” by zooming in on Nanjido, Seoul. A former landfill and brownfield, the island was transformed into an ecological park in the lead-up to the 2002 FIFA World Cup. Performing athletic tricks on top of decades of chemical and radiating waste, skateboarders must attend to and live alongside the hidden anthropogenic materialities and invisible social histories of the eco-park. This ethnography provides evidence of the tactics that skateboarders use to navigate and mitigate the socio-material repercussions of pollution—from denial to fact-finding. The skatepark also marks a shift in the social discourse on skateboarding in South Korea. Historically, the practice is considered an ing-yeo-jit: a “useless” and wasteful youth activity—a social pollutant. Encapsulated in gentrification strategies masked as environmentalism, skateboarding is presented as a “useful” and “healthy” practice used to push the park's green and salubrious image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While classical ruins are seen as tourist destinations, contemporary or industrial ruins are dismissed as disused sites. In this paper I argue for the preservation of urban (or contemporary) ruins. I focus on one specific case, that of the Miami Marine Stadium in Miami, Florida USA. Since the 1990s the stadium has been derelict, a canvas for graffiti artists and a home to skateboarders. In 2018 the City of Miami decided to revamp the stadium and reopen it as a concert and sporting venue. The current design-development plan has sanitized this urban ruin, robbing it of its past. I will situate the debate about rehabilitating contemporary ruins within the growing literature of the neo-picturesque, specifically neo-picturesque landscape design. I believe that urban ruins such as these have a place in the modern city and will suggest some paths forward for these neo-picturesque ruin beauties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to raise some hypotheses about given contemporary youth subjectivities. To do so, it uses two moments of the same research: on the one hand, the analysis that starts from pieces of advertising and propaganda dated in different periods, in order to take the notion of "youth" from a social and historical perspective; on the other hand, notes are presented that result from an ongoing Brazilian investigation in the city of Rio de Janeiro with street skateboarders and their media manifestations on digital social networks. The proposal is to reflect on "new" places and spaces of youth subjectivities that occur through the search for social visibility, whether in urban or media channels, potentially giving certain subcultures, such as that of skaters that is observed here, a social role that was previously unfeasible and silenced, as shown by analyzed newspaper and magazine ads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper explores the ethics of representing girls and young women from the global South in Sport for Development (SfD) organizational campaigns via the case of Skateistan—an international SfD organization with skateboarding and educational programs in Afghanistan, Cambodia, and South Africa. Focusing particularly on Skateistan's representations of skateboarding girls and young women in Afghanistan, we draw upon interviews with staff members as well as digital observations and organizational curriculum materials, to reveal some of the nuanced power relations within such media portrayals. In so doing, we also draw attention to some of the unintended risks of "positive" representations of sporting girls from the global South, and some of the strategies employed by Skateistan to navigate such issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploration paper considers the sport/art/activity of skateboarding as it intertwines with spatial experiences, identities, and our personal and kinetic vernaculars. I try to understand what skateboarders, and Indigenous skateboarders especially, can teach us about alternative ways to understand space, place, and identity. I posit that skateboarding encourages spatial comprehension and landscape-use in particular ways, what I think of as a skatescape: a landscape as seen through skateboarders' eyes. Through a skateboarding media and art lens, I reflect on some ways in which skateboarding influences narratives of place and belonging. I then consider these personal narratives and attempt to broaden the definition of a skatescape and in so doing speculate on how we create, share, and navigate our unique and personal spatial languages through movement and presence. Finally, I reveal that appreciating Indigenous skatescapes has illuminated a blindspot in my settler psyche: that up until recently I had not acknowledged fully that each and every spot I have ever skated was and is Indigenous land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India's urban infrastructure is maligned for its breakdowns, inefficiencies, and inequities, and popular resentment at dysfunctional infrastructure is constant in public life. This article focuses on the surprising desire for India's urban infrastructure among skateboarders. Skateboarders are drawn to India's urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction, its seemingly unfinished nature. I explore these relationships by analysing four skate videos and making three arguments. First, infrastructure attracts skateboarders for possibilities of creative interpretation and appropriation, on‐camera aesthetics, and the encounters generated between mostly foreign (though not always "western") skaters and local urban dwellers. Second, far from isolated moments, the appropriation of India's infrastructure is captured and circulated to an audience of millions in skateboard videos. Third, skate video presents urban India as a frontier in its subcultural geographic and cartographic imagination; although over two decades India's cities have drifted closer to skateboarding's core; concrete and steel replacing cows and festivals on screen. The article closes by exploring the implications for skateboarding—a subculture built on disrupting the city, hacking its infrastructure, moving against its flows—when operating in spaces where disruption is the essential condition of everyday life, and how this is transmitted to an adjacent viewing public. Skateboarders are drawn to India's urban infrastructure because of its dysfunction. Specifically, India's infrastructure offers possibilities for creative interpretation and appropriation, on‐camera aesthetics, and encounters between mostly foreign (though not always "western") skaters and local urban dwellers. The appropriation of India's infrastructure is captured and circulated to an audience of millions in skateboard video, presenting urban India as a frontier in its subcultural geographic and cartographic imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Infrastructure generates social relationships as bodies (human and non-human) encounter one another moving through urban and peri-urban space. Studies explore these relationships in-depth, however there is limited consideration of social relationships generated through deliberate mis-use of infrastructure, termed the alter-sociality of infrastructure in this article. This article focuses on the mis-use of infrastructure by skateboarders and the filmers and photographers who capture their unsanctioned performances. It makes three arguments. First, skateboarders are an adjacent public for infrastructure, invested in its constant production but not in its intended use. Second, skateboarding promotes an altersociality of infrastructure drawing our attention to desire, damage, surveillance, and wounding generated by mis-use. Third, unlike other appropriations of infrastructure for mis-use, skateboarding is captured as video and image, circulated globally through digital technology, freely accessible, and consumed and emulated by millions of skaters across the world. As a result, otherwise ordinary infrastructure has profound subcultural significance, widely shared histories, and draws skaters from other cities and other countries to arrangements of surfaces, objects and obstacles barely noticed by other urban dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper takes a look at contemporary sports management systems and how they cannot facilitate meetings and connect potential prospect talents with the ideal sports agency. The current condition of physical culture and sports within rural communities in Ukraine leave much to be desired. Many of the talented athletes and kids living in these rural communities are not given the opportunity they deserve to hone their skills in sports and make a career out of their talent. Therefore, sports for them, has only become a leisurely activity and they are expected to let go of it once they reach the age of maturity. The paper goes on to highlight a proposed quality management system of physical culture and sports services that can eliminate this issue using standardization of the quality management. Lack of innovation during the development and deployment of management systems for sports in Ukraine prevents the industry from reaching its full potential. Therefore, it is vital to understand what the public and the sponsors require from a technical system that handles profiles of sports athletes and manages them according to user requirements. The research incorporates a secondary methodology with an emphasis on qualitative analysis. This allows for the researcher to develop a systematic literature review using previous researches already conducted within the same field. Through this methiodal, arguments and statements of other researchers can be extracted based on innovation in cultural sports and management systems. This paper aims to highlight a potential model that has a unique and innovative feature of matching a consumer to the nearest sports sponsorship organization in Ukraine. The hypothesis of the study was confirmed, which was the assumption that efforts to improve only the existing practices of organizational activities cannot significantly improve the state of physical culture and sports and the quality of physical culture and sports services to residents. The paper also delves into the benefit of its implementation as well as potential issues that may arise once it is deployed. Lastly, the proposed innovation system must be assessed further by other researchers to gauge its technical implementation and identify pitfalls and issues that may come up during development. If they are identified, they can be eliminated, once the system starts to undergo a proper development process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers skateboarding practices in urban public spaces. Often subversive, the interactions between skateboarders and built features are also regularly captured in visual imagery in print and online. The paper documents encounters between skateboarders and the built environment using visual geographic information and photo representation. Through content analysis of imagery from Instagram posts and Thrasher magazine, the aim is to organize visual/volunteered data to represent the varied types of interactions between skateboarders and particular features of the built environment. The images suggest that skateboarders seek out structures that are typically elements within a corporate plaza or city hardscape such as stairs, rails, planters. This imagery provides large amounts of data that researchers may cull in order to improve understanding of the ways such features are experienced, and of the potential conflicts that arise when a variety of users interact. The broader significance of the research contributes to the growing body of work that positions skateboarding as a legitimate practice in urban public spaces. Scholars, practitioners of architecture, and planners, among others may continue to engage with visualization methods to consider skateboarding as an evolving, responsive, embodied practice [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical activity is commonly conceived of in terms of its human involvement – as a test of, and testament to, human ability. However, physical activity does not exist without the contributions of countless non-human agencies, such as equipment and environments, with which the athletes work closely and form relationships. As such, athletes have a unique understanding of non-human agency. In this article I analyse the power of non-human agency in skateboarding through the representations of the professional skateboarder Rodney Mullen and filmmaker Spike Jonze. I examine their lectures, interviews, and films to show the ways in which skateboarders experience, practice, and represent the principles of actor-network theory (ANT). Skateboarders utilise and manipulate the often-unanticipated potential of non-human tools and urban landscapes and translate them into a collaborative result. Skateboarding is a trial-and-error experiment of testing, innovating, and adapting possibilities and limitations set by a network of mediators including people and 'things'. Mullen and Jonze commonly depict skateboarding as the product of networks rather than independent human action. Their representations reveal how skateboarders perceive and act out their role as humans within networks alongside non-human agencies such as skateboards and obstacles, and which combine to produce skateboarding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]