Skateboarding and the Senses : Skills, Surfaces, and Spaces

Abstract

This book presents a new perspective on skateboarding, centred on the senses, skill acquisition, embodiment, and the concept of "city craft". Skateboarding and the Senses traces how skaters use their skilled bodies to bring vitality to contested spaces. Building on sensory anthropology, the book draws connections between the diverse ways skaters move and their boundless drive for social action – from rebellious interventionism to a critical engagement with sportification and the Olympics. Coalescing around skateboarding’s pedagogy of enskilment, the book examines what to make of the skater’s way of sensing the city, of their bruised heels and scabbed elbows and of their sensory attunement to their friends and foes. Grounded in historical, anthropological, and phenomenological theories of body and space, it examines how skaters acquire somatic knowledge and socio-emotional resilience through their sonic and vibratory experience of the city streets. This sensory anthropology of skateboarding reveals new insights into its long arc of subculture, lifestyle, and sport. This is essential reading for anybody with an interest in the sociology, culture or history of sport, urban geographies, sensory studies, or social and cultural anthropology.