Academic literature on the topic 'Skateboarding'

Skateboarding is growing in popularity more than ever and its further development will be sealed with its introduction to the Olympics in 2020. Stereotype of noisy, pot smoking outlaws is gradually vanishing, people enjoy watching skaters efforts and appreciate life they can bring to otherwise dull or unsafe areas. That results also in new challenges for the designers, not only in form of dedicated facilities- skateparks. As far as they are needed objects and their quality is crucial for safety of users and investment success they are also purpose built and therefore fake. They lack some of the most important aspects inscribed in skateboarders culture such as various, exciting and sometimes harsh city experience or improvisation and reinterpretation. Skateboarders will always oppose to use only dedicated areas or objects as they treat a whole city landscape as a playground.

Barcelona es escogida hoy por muchos skaters de todo el mundo como una ciudad de preferencia para vivir o visitar, pues ofrece, casualmente gracias a su arquitectura y al diseño del espacio urbano, gran cantidad de espacios ideales para la práctica del skateboarding. De esta manera, muchos espacios urbanos son reinterpretados por skaters dando lugar a nuevos usos y significados. Esta investigación se centra en el estudio sobre el desarrollo de esta práctica cultural en la ciudad de Barcelona. Partiendo de métodos tradicionales de la Antropología, como la observación distante y la observación participante, las entrevistas en profundidad, los relatos de vida y las fuentes documentales (bibliográfica, archivística y internet), el investigador ha querido presentar una etnografía como estudio de caso para estimular el debate teórico en torno a temas como la cultura y la identidad en un contexto urbano marcado por la Globalización.

<p> In recent decades skateboarding has expanded from recreation into a form of transportation. Skateboarders appear to use roadways much as other non&ndash;motorized modes do. However, there is little academic research on the needs and characteristics of the skateboard as a mode. This research reports demographics, multi&ndash;modal and travel behavior findings, and other data from an exploratory mixed&ndash;methods study of skateboarding as a mode of transportation.</p>

In recent decades skateboarding has expanded from recreation into a form of transportation. Skateboarders appear to use roadways much as other non‐motorized modes do. However, there is little academic research on the needs and characteristics of the skateboard as a mode. This research reports demographics, multi‐modal and travel behavior findings, and other data from an exploratory mixed‐methods study of skateboarding as a mode of transportation.

This thesis focuses on the skateboarding industry in China as both a youth subculture and a cultural industry. I am investigating the transition between the two and examining how the emerging skateboarding industry operates through detailed analysis of the feelings, motivations and meanings attributed to it by its participants and the emerging strata of cultural workers. In order to achieve this research objective, this thesis has positioned the analysis in a triangle of forces between the development of Chinese skateboarding culture, the emerging skateboarding cultural industry and government interventions. This ethnographic study takes into account distinctive characters in the development of Chinese skateboarding communities that signify continuities inside contemporary Chinese youth cultures. I argue that such continuity is still embedded in the organisation of the Chinese skateboarding industry as a cultural industry, in both subcultural and corporate entrepreneurial practices. Moreover, this thesis contributes to ongoing discussions in the field of not only cultural studies but also of the political economic analysis of cultural/creative industries by examining the dynamic incorporations at play between the commercial and governmental forces at the centre of current debate around the inclusion of skateboarding in the Olympic Games, and the consequences of the sportisation of skateboarding in mainstream economic structures. Last but not least, this research captures the working conditions of the cultural labourers who are at the forefront of shaping and reshaping the Chinese skateboarding industry.

In recent years research and planning efforts to enhance the conditions and opportunities for active transportation modes have increased significantly; however, these efforts have primarily focused on pedestrians and bicyclists. Skateboarding and other alternative modes of mobility remain an untapped potential for healthy and sustainable travel. This research addresses numerous knowledge gaps in the literature on utilitarian skateboarding under the larger umbrella of active transportation. Analysis of online survey results and semi-structured interviews with skateboarders in Portland, OR provides insight into the motivations and barriers of traveling by skateboard and the demographics and perceptions of skateboard commuters. Like bicyclists and pedestrians, skateboarders value safe, comfortable, and aesthetically pleasing places to travel and are sensitive to surface conditions, distance, and slope. These similarities present a unique opportunity for cities to create facilities that accommodate diverse users. Disaggregating results by the respondents' gender, skill level, and frequency of transportation-oriented skateboarding highlights significant differences in levels of perceived safety and the practicality of utilitarian skateboarding. The findings have implications for the future of active transportation planning which support Elaine Stratford's vision of "generous geographies that allow for more, and playful, mobilities in the city."

Through the examination of 12 young women skateboarders' narratives, I explore skateboarding as a gendered performance which challenges existing cultural norms about gender through the corporeal display of risk-taking and the ability to withstand pain and injury. Most of the participants construct themselves as 'alternative' women who engage in 'masculine' practices, rejecting dominant notions of femininities. Although skateboarding provides young women with a space to complicate and challenge dominate discourses of gender, skateboarding nevertheless also reinforces dominant constructions of gender. Indeed, young women struggled to establish 'alternative' identities as they are not immune to the ideological power of the dominant codes embedded in the social structures. Using a feminist poststructuralist framework (Lupton, 1999; Weedon, 1997), I explore how discursive power contributes to the construction of women's subjectivities as skateboarders and risk-takers by examining how female skateboarders come to conform to, resist and/or reconstruct dominant notions of 'femininities' and risk.

PONTIFÍCIA UNIVERSIDADE CATÓLICA DO RIO DE JANEIRO<br>CONSELHO NACIONAL DE DESENVOLVIMENTO CIENTÍFICO E TECNOLÓGICO<br>O design gráfico de linguagem singular desenvolvido na indústria do skate é o objeto de estudo desta dissertação, que procura definir quais são as suas particularidades e que fatores as determinam. O objetivo da pesquisa é estudar, por meio de uma bibliografia selecionada, análise gráfica do material coletado e realização de entrevistas, o contexto a partir do qual se criou esta linguagem gráfica e como ela se estabeleceu, partindo da premissa que a conjuntura em que o skate é praticado é responsável pela formação de um perfil próprio dos skatistas, o qual é expresso através deste design gráfico. Assim, a observação do perfil dos praticantes de skate e do cotidiano da prática deste esporte permitiu que se fizesse associações com as características encontradas nos designs gráficos dos produtos da sua indústria e então compreender o porquê do simbolismo criado e dos estilos artísticos empregados. A pesquisa também institui uma analogia entre a organização dos skatistas em um grupo independente e a criação de um campo artístico e intelectual autônomo, conforme defendido por Pierre Bourdieu. Essa analogia facilita o entendimento da intensa ligação que existe entre skate e arte, evidenciada, entre outras coisas, pela qualidade do design gráfico relacionado com este esporte.<br>The graphic design with singular language developed in the skateboarding industry is the object of study of this dissertation, which tries to define its peculiarities and which factors determine them. The objective of the inquiry is to study, through a selected bibliography, graphic analysis of the collected material and interviews, the context from which this graphic language was created and how did it get established, based on the premise that the conjucture in which skateboarding is practiced is responsible for the formation of a skateboarders` own profile, expressed through this graphic design. So, the observation of the skaters` profile and the daily life of this sport`s practice allowed doing associations with the characteristics found in the graphic designs of the products of this industry and then to understand the reasons why its symbolism was created and the artistic styles were chosen. The inquiry also sets an analogy up between the organization of the skateboarders in an independent group and the creation of an artistic and intellectual autonomous field, conformable defended by Pierre Bourdieu. This analogy makes easy the understanding of the intense connection that exists between skate and art, shown up, between other things, for the quality of the graphic design connected with this sport.

My PhD thesis offers the first ethnography of skateboarding in South Korea, an in/formal network of everyday mobility. Drawing upon over six years of experience in the region and twenty months of fieldwork, I explore how skaters negotiate their presence in the city of Seoul through precise spatial expertise, minute bodily gestures, mixed-media praxes, and intimate social relations. Contrary to what much of the earlier research on European and Northern American skateboarding suggests, I argue that skateboarding in Seoul primarily dwells in the skatepark, as though it is an urban extension of the home. I propose phenomenology and sensory ethnography as frameworks to gauge the extent to which these well-outlined architectural spaces condition how Seoulites acquire everyday coping skills, and how this affects their perceptual experience of the built environment. Significantly, these skateparks tend to be spaces of stillness, closeness, and tranquility, providing a serene and placid alternative to the notion of skateboarding as a fundamentally spectacular and trick-driven practice. Within the contours of these formalised skateparks, Seoul-based skaters also give meaning to their everyday life and social position by verbally and non-verbally relating to and distancing themselves from the notion of Hell-Joseon (“South Korea as a hell-like society for younger generations”). I approximate the myriad of lived experiences and rhythms moving through these skateparks in my research film Reverberations. Although skateparks are the sine qua non to acquire bodily skills, the typology of found urban space (called begyon) is the preferred spatial backdrop for forms of audiovisual representation of the self and the city. In this thesis, I gesture towards the mimetic dimensions of this performative and emphatic exploration of found urban space, as well as suggest that this course of action tends to take place in the presence of a video or photo camera, affecting the techniques and routines of the acute and palpable encounters between body, skateboard, and architecture. The representational taxonomy of the choreography of such bodily skills and tricks is at the heart of my second research film, called VCR. It is through an emphasis on site-specificity and the everyday—established via a written ethnography, a contemplative film (Reverberations), and an essay film (VCR)—that my study explores the sensory experience of architectural and urban space, as well as filmmaking as a gentle tool to sense and approximate the local and embodied practice that we call skateboarding.