Skateboard Video: Archiving the City from Below - Hardcover

by Duncan McDuie-Ra (Author)

This book is about skateboard video and experimental ways of thinking about cities. It makes a provocative argument to consider skate video as an archive of the city from below. Here 'below' has a dual meaning. First, below refers to an unofficial archive, a subaltern history of urban space. Second, below refers to the angle from which skateboarders and filmers gaze upon, capture, and consume the city--from the ground up. Since taking to the streets in the early 1980s, skateboarding has been captured on film, video tape and digital memory cards, edited into consumable forms and circulated around the world. Videos are objects amenable to ethnographic analysis while also archiving exercises in urban ethnography by their creators. I advocate for taking skate video seriously as a (fragile) archive of the urban backstage, collective memory across time and space, creative urban practice, urban encounters (people-to-people and people-to-object/s), and the globalization of a subculture at once delinquent and magnificent.

Back Jacket

'In crisp, engaging prose, McDuie-Ra recognizes the rich resource that skateboarding video provides for tracing urban transformation at a variety of scales. In framing such media as an unparalleled window on how our city spaces--from the quotidian to the spectacular--are experienced, McDuie-Ra's analysis does what only the best urban research can achieve, offering a profound and previously ignored vantage point for understanding the intimacies that evolve between humans and their shared built environments. And it does so in the context of media and performances of urban skateboarding that are in turn masterful, subversive, obnoxious, artful, problematic, beautiful, and startling.' --John Carr, UNSW, Australia'In this engaging and provocative work McDuie-Ra's metaphor is powerful; here is a culture that documents itself "from below". By adopting the video camera as a ritual item, skateboarders have created an informal archive of urban life and social change. In studying these videos, the author invites us to become intimately familiar with the overlooked corners of cities across the globe, presenting an informal index of development and austerity, and an extraordinary resource for academic study. This clear and accessible voice questions the central tenets of skateboard culture, showing that through video, skateboarders can be responsible delinquents, and inclusive elitists who cherish and honour their history. A remarkable text that urges the reader to reconsider the ways we archive urbanism, occupy space, and think of race.'--Paul O'Connor, author of Skateboarding and Religion'In an era when footage speaks louder than words, McDuie-Ra convinces us that we can perceive and understand cities from an alternative, yet novel perspective. This is a highly readable and intriguing work for urban sub-cultural scholars interested in conducting media-based archival research or content analysis, as well as for those seeking an in-depth depiction of skaters' embodied and socio-cultural experience.'--Chihsin Chiu, National Taiwan UniversityDuncan McDuie-Ra is Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots (2021).

Author Biography

Duncan McDuie-Ra is Professor in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Newcastle, Australia. His most recent books include: Skateboarding and Urban Landscapes in Asia: Endless Spots (2021), Ceasefire City: Militarism, Capitalism, and Urbanism in Dimapur (2020, co-authored with Dolly Kikon) and Borderland City in New India: Frontier to Gateway (2016).