Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewWhile Skateboarding LA is not the first ethnography of the sport, it can rightfully claim to be the most rigorous and in depth of the existing literature … Throughout the book, Snyder critiques previous research that has assumed subcultures like skateboarding are uniformly about youthful resistance to the demands of capital. Instead, he approaches the sport as a production process. -- American Journal of Sociology
A personal and descriptive ethnographic ac¬count of how male skaters based in the street and associated industries continue in their various attempts to progress the sport … Snyder’s depiction of spatial usage, capital codes and benefits, as well as communal activism found within today’s neo-liberal skateboarding scene is compelling. -- Canadian Journal of Sociology
An intensive and engaging study, written in vivid detail and supported by copious numbers of photographs. -- Social Forces
A rigorously researched and richly rendered ethnography of skateboarding that takes us beyond the acrobatics, lingo, and lifestyles of its elite practitioners into the economics and subcultural dynamics of the scene, and its forays into political activism and sense of community. The readers perception of skating is flipped like the proverbial board. Far from & skate punks, & pros are elite athletes and their friends and collaborators are engines of new-media creativity. Gregory Snyder has done it again, producing another iconic study of a key subculture and in the process offers nothing less than a meditation on the nature of career, work and life. -- Jonathan Ilan,Author of Understanding Street Culture: Poverty, Crime, Youth, and Cool
The magic by which street skateboarders execute impossible aerial tricks is wrapped in another kind of magic: their ability to transform the most mundane of urban spaces into open-air theaters of collective performance. Snyder is hip to both sorts of magic, and because he is, Skateboarding LA is a thing of beauty: urban sociology on four wheels, cultural criminology on the fly, and ethnography at its best -- Jeff Ferrell,Author of Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, an
