Brilliant new book on skateboarding as a craft

Michael James Roberts
Department of Sociology, San Diego State University

My advice: go get this book. You will not regret it. Sander Hölsgens’ and Brian Glenney’s new book Skateboarding and the Senses is a must read for those of us interested in skateboard studies and the cultural politics of lifestyle sports more generally. It will also have widespread appeal for scholars in sports studies and cultural studies more broadly. It is very well written and compels you to think about skateboarding in new ways that have political and ethical implications beyond skateboarding qua skateboarding.

Their attention to ethics and politics is why this book makes a crucial intervention in skateboard studies. The following is perhaps the most important thing they have to say: “If skateboarding becomes just another sport, another commodity to sell goods or win medals, or another pastime to look back on with nostalgic purchases, it is a dead craft” (79). Bravo! The definition of skateboarding as a craft is key to their intervention and it is the focus of chapter 3, titled “Crafting the City: Embodied, Symbolic and Engaged Skateboarding.” The conventional, more typical question pertaining to skateboarding – and surfing – is the following: is it a sport, a “lifestyle” or both? Defining skateboarding as a craft shifts the analysis beyond the conventional definitions and categories that have now become relatively exhausted.

Indeed, they waste no time in making their case, as the book opens by arguing that part of the allure of skateboarding is its “resistance to being a sport or lifestyle or punk activity. What exactly skateboarding is or represents has been unclear since its origins…” (1). I must admit that I really love this way of thinking about skateboarding, even if my own sympathies lie with aligning skateboarding with “punk activity.” That is how I grew up with it and still experience it today. Hmmm… now that I think about it, perhaps this is precisely what makes skateboarding punk: a refusal to be defined, always resisting attempts to capture it. That’s an argument for another day. Back to this extraordinary and excellent book…

I love how this choice of words deconstructs the binary of highbrow and lowbrow culture while at the same time framing skateboarding as an activist endeavor, à la Angela Davis

As mentioned, the content of the book is very interesting and quite compelling, and I will get back to that, but first it is worth mentioning that the form of the book is also interesting and somewhat unusual. It’s short but packed with thought-provoking arguments. The point about the form is to make the book feel like a skateboard session. The form is of its content, as Hegel liked to say. In their words: “the brevity of this book reverberates the flow of a [skate] session… reading this book takes most readers about as long as a singular skate session of a full afternoon… (8). Getting the right feel is crucial to what the book is trying to do, hence the title of the book Skateboarding and the Senses. Since I referred to the philosopher Hegel, it makes sense to mention another intervention that I really, really like, and that is where the authors describe skateboarders as “philosophers of the streets.” On page 79 they write, “the stoics had their porch, Socrates his square, Angela Davis her square and enforced prison cell, Sophie Oluwole her classroom, and the skaters their city spots” (78-9). I love how this choice of words deconstructs the binary of highbrow and lowbrow culture while at the same time framing skateboarding as an activist endeavor, à la Angela Davis. For those who may not be familiar with what is going on in skateboard studies, this book helps to make it clear what is at stake with skateboarding. Skateboarding matters, because it intervenes into the social world in ways that have important ethical and political implications beyond the cosmos of skateboarding. I will return to this aspect at the end of this review.

There are six chapters in the book. The first is about writing skate culture.  The second is about the body and skateboarding, what they call a “sensory anthropology of movement.” The fourth chapter is about a certain kind of pedagogy, and it is titled, “Failure and the Senses.” My favorite chapters are the last two: “Grey Pleasure: Skateboarding as a Deviant and Salubrious Ecology,” and “Epilogue: Toward a Multispecies Futurity for Skateboarding.” But let me get back to the question of craft before mentioning why the last two chapters are my favorite.

In chapter 3, titled “Crafting the City,” they compare skateboarders to the Situationists. I really, really like this, as I have also emphasized this in my own work (Roberts, Lalwer and Cline 2024). They write: “not unlike the Situationists’ notion of psychogeography and graffiti artists’ use of tags, skaters combine the analytic and the associative to scrutinize and socially transform the built environment” (29). Whatever skateboarding is or is not, I think we can agree with Hölsgensand Glenney that skateboarding is more than a sport and more than a lifestyle. Especially when the focus is on what skateboarders do in, or rather, to the city. They transform it. Skating the city changes it. Readers familiar with skateboard studies know this argument already, especially from the ground-breaking work by Iain Borden (2001).

But Hölsgens and Glenney move beyond Borden’s important work in the way that they take into consideration what they call the “wild spaces” and “unregulated life” that exists in the urban form (72–73). So, what’s at stake? Nothing less than freedom and democracy. These are big stakes indeed. How can they make this case in a book about skateboarding?

 In the section they call “Ecological Enskilment,” they consider the deviant act of skateboarding in relation to the growth of “weeds” in the city. That’s right, “weeds.” But this is an affirmative take, not an insult. I’m paraphrasing. In their words, “there is a parallel between spontaneous nature and skateboarding’s deviant play” (72). Since this is in my favorite chapter of the book, I’ll provide a lengthy-ish quote:

Compared to monocultural greens – often planted and managed by municipalities – wild growth overwhelmingly represents biodiversity usually neglected or unrecognized in the context of the built environment… we recognize that these interstitial spaces give space to nature’s and society’s suppressed undercurrent: here there’s possibility and hope for pluralism, spontaneity, and unregulated life… skaters notice and form alliances with… the untamable greens of wild growth. Their sensorium pulsates with environmental awareness: forging unexpected alliances with the non-living and living others, the friendliness of their skateable environment is co-dependent on the spontaneity of urban ecologies. Their tacit knowledge of the city makes them sensors in a city in flux, witnessing the decline and blossoming of wild space… While not necessarily conscious, skaters attend to the ecological features of the built environment. In so doing, they are sensorily attuned to industrialist ecodice and other modes of toxicity and poisoning – recognizing hope and creativity where others see none (72–73).

“Recognizing hope and creativity where others see none.” To borrow from the vernacular, that is some dope prose right there.

Drop the mic Sander Hölsgens and Brian Glenney and walk off the stage. Exit stage left.

Copyright © Michael James Roberts 2025

References

Borden, Iain. 2001. Skateboarding, Space and the City: Archigtecture and the Body. Oxford and New York: Berg Publishing.

Roberts, Michael, Lawler, Kristin and Cline David. 2024. Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing. San Diego, Ca: San Diego State University Press.