Call for chapters
Subculture of Skateboarding‏
Due date: 1 November 2013

In Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body, the first academic monograph on skateboarding, Iain Borden noted that “academic and external records of skateboarding are extremely limited… there have been few historical accounts of its internal practices and development, still less of its wider social meanings” (2001, p. 4). Since then, many more studies on skateboarding have emerged from areas as diverse as urban design, sociology of sport, medicine, geography and youth studies. Academic discussion reveals various and often contradictory understandings of skateboarding: it is a multi-million dollar industry, recreational activity, sport, children’s pursuit, fad, underground movement, criminal activity, form of transport, and an aesthetic practice. Considered ‘extreme’ by corporations, yet not by those involved in the subculture (e.g. Australian Skateboarding Magazine editorial April 2003), skateboarding has become more ‘respectable’ as it is increasingly mainstreamed, yet is still considered in terms of resistance (to capitalist social relations, spatial control, and commodification, for example).

This edited collection aims to provide a wide-ranging introduction to the theoretical understandings and critical explorations of the meanings, practices and subculture of skateboarding. I invite contributions which emphasise the cultural, social, spatial and political dynamics of skateboarding. Possible areas of research include (though are not limited to):
– Skateboarding as socio-political resistance
– Space – spatial tactics and practices, the production of space, representations of space
– Commercialisation
– Governance, policy and social control
– Fashion
– Gender relations
– Race
– Media
– Representations of skateboarding in popular culture (TV, film, etc.)
– Subculture
– Identity formation
– Ethnography

Submissions from diverse fields of study, including cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban studies, and history, are encouraged.

Interested contributors should send abstracts of 300-350 words to Kara-Jane Lombard (k.lombard@curtin.edu.au) before 1 November 2013. Please attach a short biographical statement including your contact information, affiliation and recent publications.