Title: Skateboarding - sport or lifestyle Objectives: The aim of the thesis is to examine connections, relationships and results, why are skateboarders prefering this activity and to describe them objectively within the majority culture to understand their thoughts. We will try to describe, what are the main differences between them and the rest of the society and how it is important to their own identity. Methods: We gained needed quantity of information from 6 skateboarders, with the aid of qualitative method - semi-structured interview. The data picking was taking place from April to July 2015. From the gained information we analysed behaviour patterns, motives, motivation and thought of the skateboarders. Results: Skateboarders never think about definitions, have no interest in somehow categorizing skateboarding. Some skateboarders immediately identify with the fact that skateboarding is their lifestyle, some of them gradually realize that skateboarding lifestyle can be for their way of life considered, others argue that they would skateboarding lifestyle imagine more intensive than how they do it. Nevertheless they admit, that their life can probably be closer to something that could be called the lifestyle of skateboarders. So that a man could confess lifestyle, activity must be operated...

Denna uppsats undersöker den emotionella dimensionen i det kommersiella företaget WeSC:s marknadsföring genom att göra en kvalitativ innehållsanalys på datamaterialet som har bestått av en av deras senaste reklamfilmer, sekundära intervjuer som gjorts med grundaren Greger Hagelin, företagets presentation i boken Superbrands Sverige (2004) samt på hemsidan. Vi har även kompletterat analysen genom att göra en sekundär analys på forskaren Rebecca Beals studier av den subkultur som WeSC använder sig utav i sin emotionellt säljande marknadsföring. Den analys som vi gjorde av Beals studier resulterade i att vi kunde utröna tre viktiga grundstenar för skateboardkulturen – 1. Öppet deltagandet, att alla skulle få möjligheten att vara med oavsett bakgrund, 2. Individuell ansvarsfullhet, att varje utövare skulle ansvara för sitt eget spel i frånvaron av domare, regler och tränare, samt 3. Möjligheten att vara kreativ, frånvaron av domare, regler och tränare skulle tillförsäkra vare utövare att vederbörande var sin egen expert och därigenom kunde använda sin egen kreativitet till att skapa sitt eget spel.När vi sedan jämförde innehållet i dessa grundstenar med WeSC:s presentation av samma grundstenar i sin marknadsföring upptäckte vi att mycket av det ursprungliga innehållet modifierats i syfte att anpassa företagets kommersiella ansats. Detta tolkar vi som ett explicit exempel på att anammandet av subkultur av ett företag inte alltid fungerar positivt för subkulturen – då dess huvudsakliga symboliska värden förgås i kommersialiseringens och marknadsföringens process.

Thesis (M.L.A) -- University of Texas at Arlington, 2008.

<p>Young people in Japan contend with shifting understandings of family and friends, insecure jobs, and changing frames around global and national identities. The category of youth itself is unsettled amid a long period of social and economic change and perceived widely as crisis. Within contested social categories of youth, how do young Japanese people use the city, media, and body practices to create flexible, meaningful sociality across spaces of work, education, and play? What do youthful sociality and practices reveal about globally oriented connections and how do they inform conceptions of the future, kinship, gender, and pluralized identities? In short, what is the embodied and affective experience of being young as the category itself is increasingly unstable and full of risks? These questions shape the contours of this project.</p><p>This dissertation considers youth through its becoming, that is, the lived enactment of youth as energy, emotion, and sensibility always in motion and within range of cultural, spatial, bodily, and technological forces. Three groups of young people in this layered latitudinal study demonstrate various relations to the city street, visual media, globalized identities, contingent work within affect and cultural production, and education. The three groups are distinctly different but share surprising points of connection. </p><p>I lived alongside these three groups to understand the ways young people are innovating within the shifting form of youth. I skated with male skateboarders in their teens to early 30s who created Japan's most influential skate company; I taught kids attending a specialized cram school for kikokushijo (children who have lived abroad due to a parent's job assignment); I observed and hung out with young creative workers, the photographers, web designers, and graphic artists who produce the visual and textual content and relationships composing commercial "youth culture." </p><p>My project examines how these young people redefine youth through bodily practices, identities, and economic de/attachments. The skaters' embodied actions distribute/dissipate their energies in risky ways outside formal structures of labor. The kikokushijo children, with their bi-cultural fluency produced in circuits of capitalist labor, offer a desirable image of a flexible Japanese future while their heterogeneous identities appear threatening in the present. The creative workers are precariously positioned as "affective labor" within transglobal (youth) cultural production, working to generate visual and textual content constant stressful uncertainties. All three groups share uneasy ground with capitalist practices, risky social identities, and crucially, intimate relations with city space. In attending to their practices through ethnographic participation and video, this dissertation explores questions concerning youthful relations to space produced in material contacts, remembered geographies of other places and imaginary urban sites. </p><p>The dissertation itself is electronic and non-linear; a formal enactment of the drifting contact between forms of youth. It opens up to lines of connection between questions, sites, events, and bodies and attempts an unfolding of affect, imagination, and experience to tell stories about histories of gender and labor, city life, and global dreams. It asks if the globalized forms of Japanese youth avoid the risks of the impossible secure for the open possibilities of becoming and thus refuse containment by crisis?</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Michigan State University. English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 2, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 247-253). Also issued in print.

Orientador: Marcos Américo / Banca: Ricardo Luis Nicola / Banca: Rosamelia Parizotto Ribeiro / Resumo: O objetivo deste projeto é relatar a experiência da produção de um programa educativo/esportivo para ensinar o skate. Dessa forma foi criado um Objeto de Aprendizagem (OA), que se apoia na internet como plataforma de circulação e divulgação. O conteúdo deste AO visa ensinar as bases do skate, explicando a nomenclatura do esporte, com o subsídio de efeitos visuais inseridos em tempo real por meio da Realidade Aumentada (RA) e dos conceitos teóricos do Edutretenimento, que consiste em criar um ambiente favorável que ensina entretendo. Este trabalho apresenta experimentos feitos com o ARSTUDIO, um sistema de estúdio virtual de baixo custo, em desenvolvimento na UNESP/Bauru e experimentos feitos com um sistema doméstico desenvolvido pelo pesquisador, ambos permitem a criação de cenas com RA, integrando ambiente e apresentadores reais com objetos virtuais tridimensionais. Como metodologia para a produção desta dissertação, foi realizada uma pesquisa exploratória em conteúdos acadêmicos convergentes do conhecimento e uma pesquisa participativa onde são apresentados relatos das etapas criativas de pré-produção, produção,pós-produção e experiências da gravação e transmissão ao vivo com RA. Este projeto propõe ainda uma solução para que integrantes da cultura participativa da Internet possam gerar produtos audiovisuais a baixo custo, pelo uso da RA,e assim atender a produção de conteúdos audiovisuais educativos. Por fim, é realizado um ensaio comparativo das experiências e das técnic... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The objective of this project is to report the experience of producing an educational/sports program to teach skateboarding, in this way a Learning Object (LO) was created, which relies on the internet as a platform for circulation and dissemination. The content of this LO aims to teach the bases of skateboard, explaining the nomenclature of the sport, with the allowance of visual effects inserted in real time through the Augmented Reality (AR) and the theoretical concepts of Edutertainment, which consists of creating a favorable environment that teaches entertaining. This work presents experiments made with ARSTUDIO, a low cost virtual studio system under development at UNESP / Bauru and experiments done with a home system developed by the researcher, both allow the creation of scenes with RA, integrating environment and real presenters with objects three-dimensional virtual worlds. As a methodology for the production of this dissertation, an exploratory research was conducted on convergent academic contents of knowledge and a participatory research where the creative steps of pre-production, production, post-production and experiences of recording and live transmission with RA are presented. This project also proposes a solution so that members of the participatory Internet culture can generate audiovisual products at low cost, by using RA, and thus attend the production of audiovisual content. Finally, a comparative test of the experiments and techniques used is carried ou... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Why do original/grassroots branding efforts occurring on a local level continue to proliferate despite the existing market saturation created by larger corporate entities? Using existing theoretical frameworks associated with “do it yourself” (DIY) culture, this thesis explores cultures and themes associated with skateboarding, including the production and consumption of brands of skateboarding products; the use of space and spatiality by skateboarders; and, finally, changes in skateboarding. I conducted ethnographic interviews within a network of skateboard entrepreneurs in the Florida skateboard community, seeking to understand why they start brands, their perceptions of their entrepreneurial efforts, and how these businesses operate. Drawing from historical, visual and interview data, I identify the roles that branding efforts play into the formation of skateboard culture. The project analysis creates an understanding of skateboard culture that explores skateboard identity at the intersections of consumer/citizen, individual/citizen and the politics of larger capitalist structures and the entrepreneurial efforts of local business.

Skaters occupy spaces around the city, and they navigate their surroundings with an analysing gaze that differs from the average person’s perception of the city. They see possibilities in ordinary objects such as a curb, bike rack or planting pot and give these objects a new purpose and meaning. In this essay I aim to investigate and describe how the skaters of Umeå view their city. What are the places they prefer, and how do they value their surroundings. By interviewing skaters and observing the places they roam their experiences as skateboarders and active utilizers of the city will be put into the perspective of public space and the purpose of it as a whole. Can providing skateboarders with environments they enjoy be used as a tool to activate public spaces in the city and thus create more including spaces? The result shows that skaters are deeply investigated into the urban fabric of their city and that there are several places around Umeå in which they enjoy dwelling. It reveals that beyond the physical design and architecture of skatespots, the social structures and the senses of place are values that skaters highly regard. However, some of Umeå’s more central public spaces doesn’t provide the conditions that skateboarders crave, and they give their opinion on how these public spaces can better suit skateboarding. Keywords: Skateboarding, public space, urban architecture, including design

The aim of this thesis is to capture the view of the first generation of skateboarders on the emergence and development of skateboarding in Czechoslovakia in the 1970s and 1980s. The research will be based on two important pillars, i.e. the explanation of the contemporary context in Czechoslovakia, with an overlap into the history of skateboarding in the USA and the qualitative method of oral history that I will use in the second pillar of the research to capture witnesses' memories. Half-structured interviews with 6 narrators, i.e. representatives of the first skateboarding generation, will be carried out within the oral history method. The source of the research will be based on interviews, scholarly literature, period articles from newspapers and periodicals and, last but not least, historical materials such as photographs or videos for a comprehensive study of the subject.

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.