Search

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

This paper conceptualises the experiences of Hong Kong Chinese women skateboarders through the emergent concept of skatefeminism. It responds to the recent global growth and transformation of women's skateboarding as a visible and promoted part of the sportification and industry of skateboarding. Notably the rise in visibility and inclusion of women's skateboarding has coincided with an active debate on issues of social justice and sexual identities in skateboarding. We ask, in what ways do Hong Kong women skateboarders express alternatives femininities and can these be explored through skatefeminism? Our cohort of 10 women skateboarders share many of the values and ambivalences of women skateboarders in North American research. But in contrast our participants expressed conservative views regarding gender roles, physical abilities and relationships. Skatefeminism provides a way to make sense of these diverse outlooks and understand the different perspectives of female skateboarders while continuing to recognise their shared experience and subjectivities through skateboarding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing conflicts between skateboarders and pedestrians on the campuses have caused safety concerns. Although traffic planners on campus usually did not consider skateboarding into planning due to the lack of historical skateboarding data. The traditional data collection method such as manual counting or video detection took a lot of effort and could only provide macrolevel skateboarding data. Therefore, this research presented a new approach for skateboarder detection using the roadside LiDAR sensor. A two-stage classification method was developed to distinguish skateboarders and other road users. The first stage was to classify motor vehicles and nonvehicles (pedestrians, bicycles, and skateboarders). Then the second step was to distinguish skateboarders from pedestrians and bicycles. The proposed procedure was evaluated using real-world data on campus. The results showed that the proposed procedure can detect the skateboarder with the overall accuracy of 89.5%. The data collected in the real world showed that the speed of the skateboarder was usually higher than the pedestrian and lower than the bicycle. The skateboarding information extracted from the proposed detection method could be applied for skateboarder behavior analysis, volume counting, and safety analysis. A level-based procedure to reinforce the safety between skateboarders and pedestrians was recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interplay of leisure, activism and the animation of public space by exploring CITE – A Celebration of Skateboard Arts and Culture, an art installation and pop-up skate park featuring skateable sculptures constructed in commemoration of Toronto skateboarder Justin Bokma. CITE, which took place in the summer of 2018, deliberately transformed The Bentway, a new public space and programming platform in Toronto which has transformed the underside of the Gardiner Expressway into a gathering place for city inhabitants, into a temporary destination where skateboarders engaged in activist, educational, and arts and cultural practices to situate the act of skateboarding within the broader context of urban placemaking. Drawing on a variety of empirical materials (e.g., interviews, videos, social media, promotional materials, press releases, observations), this case study seeks to understand how so-called 'gentle activism' animates public space and advances inclusive placemaking. Findings show that, through gentle activism, CITE underscored (1) the salience of arts and aesthetics in advocating for skateboarding, (2) inclusivity of programming to facilitate interaction between skateboarders and the non-skateboarding public, (3) the utilisation of programming to amplify the activist message, and (4) intentional efforts to change perceptions of skateboarders. The case reveals a successful alternative to defensive placemaking efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Skirtboarders, a Montreal-based crew of female skateboarders, purposely challenge discourses of femininity through an Internet skateboarding blog. Interviews with crew members reveal the similarity between their sporting and Internet practices and processes that Foucault (1986, p. 28) referred to as "self-formation as an 'ethical subject'". We draw on the four aspects that Foucault outlined by which an individual constitutes herself as an ethical subject--ethical substance, mode of subjection, ethical work and telos--to analyze the Skirtboarders' reflexivity and critical engagement through their skateboarding blogging experiences. The results illustrate how sportswomen-driven forms of social media can become a means of individualized and collective ethical transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent emergence of "skurban" (the fusion of skateboarding and urban) reflects the racially diverse history and culture of skateboarding within urban areas in the United States. Skurban follows on from skateboarding's integral link with the urban since the 1980s. We aver that urban skateboarding is now underpinned by proliferating racial formations that reproduce a version of masculine authenticity that is highly marketable. Through our interrogation of two mainstream media skate videos featuring Stevie Williams and Paul Rodriguez, we propose that skurban reflects the ascendancy of highly valued urban racial masculinities. These masculinities enhance youth and action sport brand marketing strategies. Simultaneously, these diverse racial masculinities gain currency in alignment with discourses of individual entrepreneurialism, "free market" capitalism, and multicultural notions of diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how "core" members within skateboarding develop, maintain, and perform their "authentic" skate identities through interactions with the social media application Instagram. Supplementing skaters' use of traditional niche media such as zines, magazines, and videos, Instagram acts as a key outlet for skaters to develop and maintain their authentic subcultural identity. Skateboarders' view, discuss, and share media to refine and display their understanding of the subculture. Moreover, social media practices act as identity claims, which are confirmed or denied by other skaters through online and offline behaviors and discussions, (re)demarcating the boundaries of "authenticity" within the skateboard scene. [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]

This paper describes some of the ways in which popular culture may be a site of social resistance. The subculture of skateboarding is described as one form of popular culture that resist capitalist social relations, and the skateboarders' particularly overt resistance to an amateur contest provides a framework for characterizing their daily and more covert behaviors of resistance. Although social resistance has the potential to change dominant social relations, it is often limited by contradictions and accommodations. In this case, the skateboarders' sexist behavior is one of their significant contradictions. Finally, some implications of social resistance are addressed. [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]

Responding to the call of Wheaton to discuss the position of older participants in lifestyle sports, this research presents an analysis of the experiences of middle-aged skateboarders. Through qualitative interviews, ethnographic observation, and discourse analysis of skateboard media, skateboarding is revealed to be an integral part of the biographies and identities of middle-aged skateboarders. These accounts challenge the imaging of skateboarding as a youth culture and indicate that age and time have an important currency to skateboarders. The value of age is not confined to middle-aged skateboarders but is also observable in skateboard media which corresponds with the values held more broadly in skateboard culture. The concept of temporal capital is proposed as a way to make sense of the experiences of middle-aged skateboarders, highlighting how time is at once a path to subcultural authenticity, but also a resource to be managed and scheduled for their continued engagement in skateboarding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of a series of public skateboarding parks (skateparks) in rural areas in northeast Alabama came about between 2005 and 2007. Skateparks are expensive projects for rural Alabama city governments to undergo; yet, numerous parks have been built within the last decade. Our research explores why these parks were built, where space was allocated for the park, who funded them, and how the space is regulated. The majority of our data come from interviewing city authorities or parties that had a role in funding or campaigning for a skatepark. We have found the establishment of these parks had mix motivations with parties wanting to support skateboarders and others to keep skaters off of the streets. Alabama skateparks were built as an annex to multi-sports complexes or preexisting public parks, were funded from a variety of private and public sources, and are regulated by signage and policing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the study which aim to determine the process and concept of socialization made by skateboarders along with the actualization of their position in the skateboarding culture. Topics discussed include the component of a skateboarder such as its creativity, relationship, and risk, the boundaries between male and female in skateboarding, and the social discord among skateboarders. It presented a lesson plan for high school students which teaches about social group.

Purpose: This study aimed to further the knowledge on gaze behavior in locomotion by studying gaze strategies in skateboard jumps of different difficulty that had to be performed either with or without an obstacle.Method: Nine experienced skateboarders performed "Ollie" and "Kickflip" jumps either over an obstacle or over a plane surface. The stable gaze at 5 different areas of interest was calculated regarding its relative duration as well as its temporal order.Results: During the approach phase, an interaction between area of interest and obstacle condition, F(3, 24) = 12.91, p <  .05, ηp2 = .62, was found with longer stable-gaze locations at the takeoff area in attempts with an obstacle (p <  .05, ηp2 = .47). In contrast, in attempts over a plane surface, longer stable-gaze locations at the skateboard were revealed (p <  .05, ηp2 = .73). Regarding the trick difficulty factor, the skateboarders descriptively showed longer stable-gaze locations at the skateboard for the "Kickflip" than for the "Ollie" in the no-obstacle condition only (p>.05, d = 0.74). Finally, during the jump phase, neither obstacle condition nor trick difficulty affected gaze behavior differentially.Conclusions: This study underlines the functional adaptability of the visuomotor system to changing demands in highly dynamic situations. As a function of certain constraints, different gaze strategies were observed that can be considered as highly relevant for successfully performing skateboard jumps. [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]

Motion visualization is an attractive way to provide support for a range of recreational and competitive sports. In skateboarding, sensor technology in particular can help visualization systems capture the motion of athletes to provide relevant information to athletes, judges, and spectators. This article describes the authors' proposed application of a 9D inertial-magnetic measurement unit (IMMU) based real-time trick classification and visualization system. It also reports on a survey they conducted with skateboarders that asked about the usefulness, acceptance, and future ideas of such a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting in the 2000s, there has been a rise in youth-led appropriation of public spaces in Hanoi, Vietnam. Through case studies of skateboarders and traceurs (practitioners of parkour) in two of the city's formal public spaces, we explore and analyze the tactics deployed by these young urbanites to claim a part of the characteristically overcrowded and socio-politically restrictive public spaces of the Vietnamese capital. These case studies show that, by seeking to access public spaces for their new activities, skaters and traceurs have had to confront multiple sets of rules, imposed by not only the state, but also corporate actors and resident-driven surveillance. We find that skateboarders and traceurs deal with these forms of control largely through small-scale, non-ideological, and non-confrontational tactics. As a result, these youth practices have become normalized in Hanoi's public spaces. These findings broaden the discourses on everyday urbanism and social-political transformations in post-socialist urban contexts, and shed light on the ways in which contemporary youths engage with the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on two performances of place involving graffiti and skateboarding: the first looks at a graffiti intervention by SKL0, an urban artist in Singapore, and the second examines theLong Live Southbank(LLSB) campaign to resist the relocation of Southbank's Undercroft, an appropriated skate space in London. SKL0 andLLSBhave galvanised significant public support, suggesting that it is possible to negotiate the aesthetics of a city (in the case of SKL0) and the visibility of (sub)cultures within publicly funded cultural institutions at Southbank Centre. Extending Michel de Certeau's concept of walking as a speech act that articulates possible paths of movement across a landscape, the article suggests that these performances of place demonstrate the possibility of outcomes initially perceived as impossible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of girl and young women skateboarders in and around two cities in England. We consider what it means to have a skateboarder identity, and how this is related to commitment, skill level, and participation in local skateboarder communities. We found that girls and young women frequently need more support to take up skateboarding than do boys and young men. Crucial enablers are both structural and personal, and include: initial and ongoing support, often from young men skateboarders; women role models in skate spaces; and official women and girl only sessions. Factors inhibiting young women skateboarders include: the public perception of skateboarding; harassment from members of the public; feeling uncomfortable in skate spaces; and hassle from men and boy skateboarders. We conclude that, while skateboarding, both officially and locally, is working to become more inclusive, it remains embedded in wider gendered power/knowledge relations, which privilege and support its domination by men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: In their 2008 paper, Hodkinson, Biesta and James draw on the sociological theories of Pierre Bourdieu to construct what they claim is a ‘holistic’ theoretical framework for understanding learning. While not an attempt to dissolve the long-standing opposition between ‘cognitive’ and ‘situated’ theories, the authors claim that thinking about learning and learners in ‘cultural’ terms via Bourdieu's theories allows us theoretically to integrate individuals and learning contexts. The result, they claim, is a ‘scalable’ theory of learning that overcomes the dualisms – such as structure/agency and individual/society – that dog learning theory. We welcome both Hodkinson et al.’s ideas and overall goal. However, we were struck by the absence of any mention of communications media or digital technology in their theoretical framework. Does this mean that media and digital technology can straightforwardly be mapped onto Hodkinson et al.’s theory? Or is this a serious oversight? Purpose: Given the large amount of recent theorising about the transformative educational potential of media and digital technology – admittedly much of it speculative and hyperbolic – there appear to be some grounds for troubling some of Hodkinson et al.’s ideas by prioritising the effects of media and digital technology on learning. Methods: We used two examples of learning in sports, one historical and the other contemporary, to consider the theoretical implications of media and digital technology's role in sports learning. The first explores the ways professional footballers learned to produce displays of emotion during the 1950s and 1960s. Our second example presents data from semi-structured interviews with downhill longboard skateboarders and focuses on how these young people use and think about digital technology as they learn their sport. Findings: While not rejecting Hodkinson et al.’s preference for Bourdieu's sociological theories, we draw on other theories that do not see the relationship between the ‘individual’ and ‘society’ as their conceptual starting point. To this end, we touch on Actor Network Theory (ANT), ‘connectivism’ and the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari in order to at least question whether Bourdieu's ideas are sufficiently flexible or dynamic to account for learning in media- and technology-saturated environments. Most obviously, rather than the individual/society dualism which Hodkinson et al. simultaneously question but also rely on, are there advantages in using ‘flatter’ metaphors such as the ‘network’ to understand learning? Conclusions: We agree with Hodkinson et al.’s point that theories are tools for thinking with and that their metaphorical power can and should be harnessed to improve the way we teach. It is for this reason that we question Hodkinson et al.’s claim to offer a ‘holistic’ theory of learning. All theories, like metaphors, have real-world limitations and this is why we should always be suspicious of theories that claim to be able to ‘see’ the world from all angles and, perhaps more fundamentally, to dissolve the dualisms that they are built on. Theories are always a partial view from somewhere and just as they help us to see some things, they do so by demanding that we not see others. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]