Surfing, Street Skateboarding, Performance, and Space: On Board Motility draws from critical cultural studies, political philosophy, postcolonial studies, urban sociology, and poststructuralist theory in the context of human communication and performance to construct an epistemology of riding boards. This book ponders why we move the way we do and examines the ways in which movements communicate, developing, as a result, a theoretical perspective or board motility that is gestural and fluid, moving in relation to shifting social and physical landscapes. By combining the discourses and practices of critical theory and physical movement, this text presents a sustained analysis of radical political philosophy. In the book the symbolic narratives associated with each physical practice are deconstructed as their theoretical counterparts are thoroughly established. Then, through performance, the author narrows the divide between these two forms of thinking, verbal and nonverbal, outlining and embodying an ontological and epistemological stoke in the process that emerges from riding boards, on both waves and streets.

Skateboarding is both a sport and a way of life. Creative, physical, graphic, urban and controversial, it is full of contradictions – a billion-dollar global industry which still retains its vibrant, counter-cultural heart. Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.

Bicycling, Motorcycling, Rhetoric, and Space draws from cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and political philosophy to examine bicycling and motorcycling as serious forms of communication and even thought. By analyzing how everyday movements function in modern and postmodern contexts, Hunter H. Fine is able to determine the social meanings behind human powered and motorized forms of cycling. Through the lenses of sophistic rhetoric and poststructuralist theory, the author uncovers how such mobilities inform our thoughts and interactions. Throughout history, this informing process has promoted specific ways of thinking that have resulted in moments of protest, conquest, awareness, and transgression, which all involve a cycling rhetoric. This book contributes to various academic fields within the liberal arts and humanities while further establishing bicycling and motorcycling as important social, theoretical, and political areas of inquiry. Scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, cultural studies, and philosophy will find this book of particular interest.

Skateboarding and Femininity explores and highlights the value of femininity both within skateboarding and wider culture. This book examines skateboarding’s relationship to gender politics through a consideration of the personal politics connected to individual skateboarders, the social-spatial arenas in which skateboarding takes place, and by understanding the performance of tricks and symbolic movements as part of gender-based power dynamics. Dani Abulhawa anaylses the discursive frameworks connected to skateboarding philanthropic projects and how these operate through gendered tropes. Through the author’s work with skateboarding charity SkatePal, this book offers an alternative way of recognising the value of skateboarding philanthropy projects, proposing a move toward a more open and explorative somatic practice perspective.

This book explores the cultural, social, spatial, and political dynamics of skateboarding, drawing on contributions from leading international experts across a range of disciplines, such as sociology and philosophy of sport, architecture, anthropology, ecology, cultural studies, sociology, geography, and other fields. Part I critiques the ethos of skateboarding, its cultures and scenes, global trajectory, and the meanings it holds. Part II critically examines skateboarding in terms of space and sites, and Part III explores shifts that have occurred in skateboarding’s history around mainstreaming, commercialization, professionalization, neoliberalization and creative cities.

The Sports Book features the largest and most diverse range of sports of any comparable book--more than 200 in all--from basketball to bobsledding, karate to korfball, and synchronized swimming to ski-jumping. This up-to-date and authoritative guide presents information sourced from leading experts and sports governing bodies around the world to give you the most comprehensive book on sports to ever hit the market.