Current Issues in Education, 25(2)  1 

 
 

              Volume 25, Issue 2            November 22, 2024                    ISSN 1099-839X 
 

 

Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice: The Disruptive Liberatory 

Potential of Skateboarding in US Higher Education 
 

Eric M. Davidson 

University of California, Riverside 

 

 

Abstract: This conceptual paper articulates how the unique social, experiential, and navigational 

perspectives of college skateboarders contribute to their potential as changemakers in higher 

education. Drawing from the theory of campus ecology and multidisciplinary body of 

skateboarding scholarly literature, this paper applies the unique navigational and analytical lenses 

of skate culture to render visible oppressive institutional conditions that are currently absent from 

educational scholarship. In order to accomplish this application, I conduct an extensive search for 

literature, and begin the writing by contextualizing the macro- and micro-systemic elements of the 

U.S. tertiary system and emplacing skateboarding within them. Then, I use skate scholarship to 

argue that skateboarding provides new critical perspectives on the philosophies of public space, 

policing, and social deterrence that manifest in university spaces. Additionally, this work explores 

campus skaters’ resistance to systemic challenges such as racism, cisheteropatriarchy, and 

neoliberal capitalism. I conclude by offering future directions for both theoretical and empirical 

research that employ skateboarding as a lens through which to examine U.S. higher education. 

 

Keywords: higher education, skateboarding, campus ecology, public space, philosophy 

 

Citation: Davidson, E. (2024). Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice: The Disruptive Liberatory 

Potential of Skateboarding in US Higher Education. Current Issues in Education, 25(2). 

https://doi.org/10.14507/cie.vol25iss2.2233  

 

Accepted: 10/04/2022 

 

https://doi.org/10.14507/cie.vol25iss2.2233


Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   2 

Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice: The Disruptive Liberatory Potential of 

Skateboarding in US Higher Education 

 

Skateboarding1 is a widely popular social phenomenon in the United States, boasting 

more than six million participants in 2017, roughly 50% of whom are college-aged––at least 18 

years old (Corwin et al., 2019b). As both an individual sport and cultural community, 

skateboarding plays a significant role in the social identity development of its participants, 

shaping their navigations of and interactions with the broader society (Glenney & Mull, 2018). 

Many of the sport’s core values align well with the goals of education and schooling, including 

physical and mental health development, skill-building and demonstration of mastery, creativity, 

intrinsic motivation, and self-authorship (Beal & Weidman, 2003; Corwin et al., 2019b; Seifert 

& Hedderson, 2010). However, skateboarding’s liminal position between mainstream and 

subculture (Beal et al., 2017; Dinces, 2011; Nolan, 2003) as well as its longstanding association 

with criminality (Dickinson et al., 2022; Németh, 2006) have prevented the sport and its 

associated interest groups from developing substantive formal relationships to colleges, 

universities, and higher education research communities. This is in direct contrast to other sport 

cultures present in U.S. higher education. For example, the highly integrated relationship 

between American higher education and the sports it sponsors in intercollegiate competition is 

well-documented (e.g.,Bass et al., 2015; Comeaux, 2020). Outside of college athletics, other 

active transit sports such as cycling are typically welcomed on campus in both political and 

infrastructural capacities. Nevertheless, skateboarding maintains a significant, yet under-

examined, presence on U.S. campuses as both an athletic performative practice and a subcultural 

community. 

Skateboards provide students and other campus affiliates with a transportation option that 

requires fewer economic and logistic commitments than cars or bicycles (Fang & Handy, 2019). 

In addition, university grounds commonly hold public space designations, inviting skaters to 

enjoy the well-maintained infrastructures and unique physical features on campuses. On the 

other hand, institutional administrations, facilities teams, law enforcement agencies, and other 

members of the campus community have their own views and perspectives––often negative––on 

the sport’s presence in campus life that can vary between institutions (Jackson et al., 2018). A 

brief survey of college and university newspaper articles written since the onset of the 21st 

century reveals this variety of perspectives about skateboarding on campuses (Alvarenga, 2014; 

Dinh, 2012; Spallone, 2016). These opinions and reactions to the sport often mirror those shared 

by broader society, but they are influenced by the unique institutional contexts present in higher 

education. While a robust campus discourse about skateboarding abounds, the scholarly 

conversation about the sport and its relationship to higher education is severely limited. The 

topic is almost nonexistent from education research outlets, and existing scholarship on 

skateboarding and higher education focuses primarily on skateboarding as a mode of 

transportation (e.g., Fang & Handy, 2019) or a learning tool (e.g., Zeng et al., 2022). This dearth 

of social scientific and theoretical knowledge about skateboarding and its relationship to U.S. 

higher education prevents education scholars from accessing and utilizing the analytical skills 

that skaters employ when navigating their environments. These skills include active assessment 

of the built environment’s accessibility and functionality, recognition of exclusionary and hostile 

design, and intellectual capacities for problem-solving and social development. In the practice of 

 
1 I use skateboarding/skateboarders and skating/skaters interchangeably throughout this paper. 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   3 

skateboarding, skaters may employ them with mindful intention, but over time they become 

intuitive and embodied. If better understood, these skills will provide increasingly pointed 

opportunities for education scholars, institutional administrators, and activists to expose, critique, 

and restructure the oppressive ecological elements of the U.S. tertiary system that shield 

dominant social groups and cause harm to its marginalized stakeholders. 

 

Purpose Statement 

 

 The purpose of this writing is to articulate a critical social-political-economic framework 

for examining U.S. higher education using skateboarding’s uniquely transgressive worldview 

and its associated scholarship’s multidisciplinary approach. It is paramount to articulate the 

scope of this work clearly. It is neither a call for universities to welcome skateboarding as a 

mode of transportation nor a recommendation to the reader to begin participation in the sport, 

although both of these aims should definitely be priorities of future writing. Rather, it is an 

invitation for conventionally trained education scholars to frame their empirical and 

philosophical examinations into the tertiary system through the lens of the skateboarder; a lens 

that I argue provides a unique capacity for uncovering truth and challenging injustice. Given the 

ever-present need for expanded modes of inquiry in educational scholarship, engagement with 

alternative subcultures such as skateboarding can provide researchers with new epistemological 

frameworks through which to ground their work. Thus, this writing engages with perspectives 

from outside the intellectual traditions of the education field to render visible elements of higher 

education previously unconsidered in the discipline’s literature. 

 

Author Positionality and Acknowledgements 

 

 As a lifelong skater raised in the communities from which skateboarding emerged in San 

Diego County, California, my ecological orientation in any environment is significantly 

influenced by skateboarding. My sense of movement through space, interpretations of my 

physical and cultural environments, and worldview cannot be divorced from my participation in 

the sport. I have used these emotional and cognitive orientations as a collegiate skater, from the 

time I entered my undergraduate program through my doctoral program, both at large public 

research universities. These same orientations bring me to this work and drive my passion to 

improve the visibility of skateboarding in higher education, particularly at institutions like the 

ones I have attended, where I believe significant social and cultural reimagining is a particularly 

urgent necessity. Given this passion, it is also important for me to acknowledge that my 

worldview and capacity to bring about holistic change is limited. As a white, cisgender, straight 

man, both the U.S. collegiate environment and skateboarding culture reflect my specific 

socialization to the detriment of my marginalized peers. To this end, I commit to engaging 

decolonial, Indigenous, antiracist, and Queer perspectives and voices in my writing.  

“The word ‘thank you’ doesn’t exist in O’odham culture … sharing is simply implied, 

and we believe that all good deeds come back to the giver in some way” (Escalante, 2007). This 

paper was prepared on the lands of the Kumeyaay, Luiseño, Tongva, Cahuilla, and Serrano 

peoples, upon which I am an uninvited occupier and temporary steward. I skate, learn, and grow 

on all these lands as well as those of the Tohono O’odham, Pascua Yaqui, Diné (Navajo), and 

Apache peoples. 

 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   4 

Methodology 

 

To accomplish the aims of this work, I draw on prior empirical and theoretical work 

situating skateboarding within the campus ecologies of U.S. higher education institutions 

(Corwin et al., 2019a; Davidson, 2023). The scholarship used in this study was collected via a 

robust literature search process from the following online databases: Academic Search Complete, 

Google Scholar, and the Educational Resource Information Center. As skateboarding is a 

relatively young subject in social scientific and philosophical scholarship, I also conducted 

targeted searches for authors who presented at The Stoke Sessions: An International Conference 

on the Culture, History and Politics of Surfing and Skateboarding hosted by the San Diego State 

University Surf/Skate Studies Collaborative. 

I have created the term insider-outsider to position college students who skateboard 

within their campus ecologies, as they are integrated within the institutional environment yet 

simultaneously transgressing its prescribed physical and cultural boundaries. With this novel role 

in mind, I discuss how skateboarding culture and practice offer ways to resist social, educational, 

and economic injustice on college campuses. As insider-outsiders, the skateboarding community 

interprets engagement with public space, capital generation, and the realization of human 

potential in ways that directly challenge the American tertiary system’s settler colonial neoliberal 

status quo, a status quo that is upheld by a spatial-natural imaginary that renders many 

oppressive institutional policies invisible to campus-goers. 

In the ensuing passages, I discuss the roles and perspectives of the insider-outsider 

identity in university spaces. I begin with a broad philosophical approach to understanding how 

the physical and cultural dimensions of campuses form unique urban ecologies rife with latent 

tensions over public space, social norms, and economic productivity. Skateboarding’s presence 

on campuses often renders these tensions explicit. With this approach established, I turn to an 

exploration of how campus skateboarders interact with their universities in three alternative 

capacities: (1) interpretations of campus environments, (2) semiotic navigation of physical 

infrastructure, and (3) disruptions to the rhythm of capital production. Next, I turn to the issue of 

social justice in higher education, and how skateboarding’s presence on campus offers novel 

challenges to, or reinforcements of, dominant social orders that marginalize university students 

and other affiliates. I conclude by providing future directions for skate scholarship in higher 

education, including theoretical, empirical, and practical methods for scholars and practitioners 

to utilize the insider-outsider perspectives of campus skaters as means to advance justice. 

 

Philosophical Orientation: Higher Education and Skateboarding Ecologies 

 

 It is important to consider that the relationship between skateboarding and U.S. 

universities is informed by the philosophical and operational underpinnings of the nation’s 

tertiary system. This system’s settler colonial (e.g., Lee et al., 2020; Nash, 2019), and neoliberal 

(e.g., Giroux, 2014; Slaughter & Leslie, 1997; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004) functions are well 

documented in the discipline’s literature. The U.S. tertiary system’s prominent interest groups, 

including governments and private enterprises, maintain a complicated subversive set of political 

and discursive mechanisms by which to shield the true destructive nature of U.S. university 

operations from the public. These mechanisms highlight tertiary institutions’ contributions to 

social mobility, benign economic development, improved civic engagement, and other benefits 

yet belie their keystone position in maintaining the dominant status quo. In the ensuing passages, 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   5 

I interrogate the higher education ecology from broad to narrow and emplace skateboarding 

within this ecology. 

 

Institutional Enterprise, Pollution, and Leisure 

 

Under the present global neoliberal economic regime largely driven by U.S. imperialism, 

engines of knowledge production and dissemination, such as universities, enjoy a privileged 

position (Giroux, 2014). This economic regime’s consequences include the solidification of 

academic capitalism as the modus operandi for U.S. universities, wherein state disinvestment in 

higher education forces institutions to move to the market and privatize the knowledge they 

generate via patents, technology transfer, and state/private contracts (McClure, 2016; Slaughter 

& Rhoades, 2004). In many ways, the operation of academic capitalism and its contributions to 

anthropogenesis is inexorably tied to pollution and pollutives. Pollutives can be material, such as 

toxic chemicals used in industry and manufacturing, but they can also be considered perversions 

or defilements of normative social orders, such as the skateboarding community’s encroachment 

into public spaces (O’Connor et al., 2022). Thus, while material pollutives are often objectively 

measurable, social pollutives are context-dependent, existing only insofar as one or more 

dominant systems consider them aberrant. Relationships between universities, governments, and 

private enterprises contribute to materially pollutive knowledge uses including war, energy, 

pharmaceuticals, heavy industry infrastructure, and manufacturing, which undoubtedly have a 

negative impact on the global community (e.g., Barron et al., 2023; Giroux, 2014). At the same 

time, U.S. campuses maintain physical infrastructures marked by expansive land use and the 

notable integration of natural-environmental elements such as lawns and shade trees, widely 

considered contributors to ecological well-being normally absent from urban spaces. (Bruce, 

2011; Fiene & Sabbatini, 2011; Kriken, 2004). While nominally open to the public, these spaces 

are heavily policed in order to maintain institutional reputations as urban oases––breaks from 

normal networks of residential and commercial development; leisure sites amongst a broader 

pollutive, entropic climate that the institutions themselves help create. Universities’ accumulated 

wealth, foundationally stolen from dispossessed Indigenous communities and enslaved Africans 

(Lee et al., 2020; Nash, 2019; Wilder, 2014), contributes to the construction of heavily 

monitored, architecturally totemic built environments and fabricated green spaces.  

In the wake of these processes I argue that such seemingly unpolluted, “green” campuses 

create and maintain a kind of spatial-natural imaginary in the minds of university affiliates such 

as students, faculty, and staff, which shields them from the pollutive disjointedness between the 

campus grounds and their marginalia. The spatial-natural imaginary is an ontological 

orientation––a specific confluence of existential modalities––in the minds and behaviors of 

campus interest groups. These ways of being that make up the spatial-natural imaginary are 

informed by normative educational culture and campus physical environments, as well as the 

social, political, economic, and geographical relationships between institutions and their 

surrounding communities. Campus affiliates such as students, faculty, staff, and even members 

of the public are trained to consider university grounds as green islands in gray oceans of urban 

blight, where cleanliness, safety, and prosperity are reinforced in two key capacities: (1) 

discursively via campus communication with the public and (2) semiotically via architecture and 

landscape. The spatial-natural imaginary is especially pronounced in environments such as 

deserts and dry coastal climates common to the Southwestern United States, where 

skateboarding is particularly popular (e.g., California, Arizona, New Mexico). In these spaces, 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   6 

colonial logics motivate universities to exercise violent dominion over land use, leading to the 

implantation of green spaces in arid locales populated by non-native plants which require 

significantly more water than the environment can sustain. Prior examinations of space and 

social difference––particularly race––have determined that space and place are inherently 

contested (Neely & Samura, 2011; Soja, 2010), and that sociocultural dominion is (1) the most 

significant determinant in the development of built environments and (2) often shielded from 

public scrutiny in said environments (Lipsitz, 2007). Systems of social power and subordination 

such as whiteness and settler colonialism assign tacit meaning to spatial contexts depending on 

who inhabits them, in which “certain spaces come to be known as welcoming, safe, and 

desirable, while others are rendered dangerous, unsafe, lacking in value, and inferior” (Duran et 

al., 2022, p. 614; Lipsitz, 2007). In keeping with this theorization of space, I posit that 

institutions of higher education reinforce the spatial-natural imaginary via a set of discursive 

strategies which promote universities’ contributions to social welfare and human progress while 

reordering historical and current practices of land seizure, labor exploitation, military 

industrialism, and knowledge gatekeeping. I move to understand that university leadership 

maintains a contradictory relationship with pollution, with institutions investing significant 

capital in material pollutives while expending great energy and intention on eliminating what 

leadership deems social pollutives from the campus grounds (O’Connor et al., 2022). The U.S. 

higher education system is foundationally informed by various systems of dominion and 

marginalization including white supremacy (Gusa, 2010; Wilder, 2014), neoliberal economics 

(Giroux, 2014; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004), and settler colonialism (Lee et al., 2020). Thus, the 

social pollutives that institutions seek to eliminate include the perceived ills in the communities 

surrounding institutions as well as the personhoods, conducts, beliefs, challenges to authority, 

and lifeways that exist in defiance of these dominant orders––those of the racially, sexually, and 

socioeconomically marginalized (Duran et al., 2022). In addition, universities’ safety discourses 

dehumanize members of the subaltern such as the unhoused, undocumented, and those 

participating in informal economies such as sex work, drug dealing, graffiti art, and panhandling. 

A recent development in the discipline of leisure studies is the chromatic 

conceptualization of leisure sites––i.e., green spaces such as public parks or national forests and 

blue spaces such as public beaches, rivers, and lakes (O’Connor et al., 2022). Skateboarding, by 

its nature, occurs in gray spaces; access to urban infrastructure is a necessary prerequisite to 

participation (O’Connor et al., 2022). I offer that the subtextual implications of chromatic 

language matter significantly in understanding the impact of the spatial-natural imaginary on the 

campus community, and ultimately how skateboarding disrupts it. Whatever greenness does 

exist on university campuses contributes to campus interest groups’ notions of their institutions 

as sites of social and ecological wellness and leisure, despite the fact that the built environments 

of college campuses contribute to anthropogenesis at vastly accelerated rates when compared to 

other human-built spaces, rendering them gray spaces in green cloaks. For example, campus 

leaders, influenced by normative colonial perceptions of how university spaces are designed, 

consider the maintenance of fabricated green leisure spaces more important than the conservation 

of precious water resources, even in climates where these water resources may be better directed 

to sustain human life off campus. This masks grayness, which in turn carries pollutive 

connotations. As a form of leisure, skateboarding’s dependence on urbanicity thematically 

associates it with ideas of urban blight and the “darkness” of U.S. cities. Skateboarding’s 

presence on campus, therefore, forces campus community members to disengage from the 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   7 

spatial-natural imaginary, as the sport’s presence has a de-cloaking effect on those who observe 

it on campus. 

 

Institutional Operation, Oppression, and Control 

 

University leadership and planning teams design, construct, and maintain the built 

environments of campuses with purposes specific to tertiary education’s academic capitalist 

operations (Fiene & Sabbatini, 2011; Kriken, 2004; Renn & Patton, 2011; Slaughter & Rhoades, 

2004). Stakeholders groups are invested in the campus’ ability to catalyze the production and 

dissemination of knowledge capital and serve as a site of place-based institutional identity 

development (Bruce, 2011; Fiene & Sabbatini, 2011; McClure, 2016; Renn & Patton, 2011; 

Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). To maintain this capital generation operation institutional leaders 

maintain rigid perspectives on conduct, control, deterrence, and aesthetic order despite a public 

perception of social permissiveness (Dickinson et al., 2022; Howell, 2001; Renn & Patton, 

2011). For example, the culture of law and order influences the policing of college and university 

campuses in terms of both the structural arrangements of campus agencies and campus officers’ 

perceptions of their roles within their jurisdictions despite the significant difference in public 

safety needs of campuses vis-à-vis the wider community (Dizon, 2021). Institutions employ 

hyper-policing as a form of doctrinal protectionism against perceived external social and 

ecological threats to the campus physical environment, which is designed to center places of 

institutional mythmaking, heritage, or memory that students, alumni, and other members of the 

campus community venerate; these include sports facilities, monuments, and historic campus 

buildings (Craig et al., 2011; Dyreson, 2010). Frequently, the myths that these sites uphold are 

underpinned by the same white supremacist, imperialist, and exclusionary philosophies that 

inform the experiences of numerous marginalized student groups, particularly People of Color, 

women, and Queer communities (e.g., Duran et al., 2022). 

Racism and white supremacy are fundamental to the campus ecologies of U.S. higher 

education given the American tertiary system’s inexorable connection to Black enslavement 

(Wilder, 2014) and Indigenous dispossession (Lee et al., 2020; Nash, 2019). These historical 

systems of dominion continue to operate in the present day, rendering U.S. universities as 

embedded sites of white supremacy (Gusa, 2010). Ecological interpretations of race and higher 

education reveal the violence inherent to People of Color’s experiences on American university 

campuses both in their built environments (Duran et al., 2022; Krusemark, 2010) and their 

cultures (Gusa, 2010; Oxendine et al., 2020; Patton et al., 2016; Renn & Patton, 2011). Systemic 

racism impacts campus policing practices as it does in wider U.S. society, forcing Students of 

Color––Black male students in particular––to endure enhanced surveillance, antagonistic 

treatment, and outright violence at the hands of campus police (Dizon, 2021; Smith et al., 2007). 

Based on the U.S. tertiary system’s long and foundational history of cisheteropatriarchy, colleges 

and universities are also sites of de jure and de facto exclusion for women and LGBTQ+ people 

(Patton et al., 2016; Renn & Patton, 2011). This exclusion manifests ecologically in the campus 

social and physical environments, which commit discrimination and violence upon people in 

marginalized positions on the gender and sexuality spectrums (Patton et al., 2016).  

As higher education is a raced and gendered system, so is skateboarding; the sport 

remains heavily white-dominated (Corwin et al., 2019b) and male-dominated (Abulhawa, 2008). 

Critically, white cisheteropatriarchal spatial dominance within skate culture has created an 

environment for marginalized skaters which alienates, ridicules, objectifies, and excludes them 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   8 

(Geckle & Shaw, 2020; MacKay & Dallaire, 2013, 2014; Williams, 2020). Thus, interpretations 

of skateboarding as counterculture must attend to the multiple forms of social dominion that 

inform its current constitution. Of particular importance to this work, a significant tension exists 

in the space between skateboarding’s inherent social transgressiveness and its reinforcement of 

cisheteropatriarchy. While the presence of skateboarding in urban spaces often disrupts the 

rhythms and anthropological norms undergirded by dominant forces in American society, its 

challenges to (in)justice in the realms of racial, ethnic, sexual, and gender identities must push 

against not only these rhythms and norms, but also the oppression present within skateboarding 

subculture. Movements among marginalized skaters have long challenged the dominant status 

quo in the skateboarding community, and in doing so they also doubly challenge unjust 

externalities in wider society.  

For example, despite public perception to the contrary, Skaters of Color are integral to the 

sport’s history, culture, and continued development (Sueyoshi, 2015; Williams, 2021), and 

female and Queer subcultures within the sport have made significant challenges to the hetero-

masculine hegemony in public spaces (Abulhawa, 2008; Corwin et al., 2019b; Fang & Handy, 

2019; Geckle & Shaw, 2020). Additionally, despite its anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian 

cultural origins and continued valuation of resistance to mainstream society, skateboarding has 

not been immune to the same economic regime catalyzing changes to higher education (Beal et 

al., 2017; Corwin et al., 2019b). Thus, academic capitalism and skateboarding corporate interests 

share a common capitalist logic, particularly with regard to how profit interests influence the 

discourse of both higher education and skateboarding as public goods committed to community 

development (Beal et al., 2017; Hartley & Morphew, 2008; Morphew & Hartley, 2006). While 

college skaters may view their position on college campuses through a lens of subcultural 

identity, the actual extent to which participation in skateboarding constitutes a rejection of the 

capitalist order is mitigated by how much of this identity is constructed by capitalist interests 

(Batuev & Robinson, 2017; Cantin-Brault, 2015; Dinces, 2011). In fact, the corporate 

underpinnings of skate culture as seen through skate equipment, new media, lifestyle goods, and 

organized competition serve to legitimize skateboarding’s cultural identifiers within a capitalist 

order (Batuev & Robinson, 2017; Cantin-Brault, 2015; Corwin et al., 2019a; Dinces, 2011) in a 

manner similar to the ways that universities employ campus mythologies and institutional 

symbols to create marketable commodities. 

 

The Insider-Outsider Position 

 

The preceding points of critique highlight the fact that skate culture contains similar sites 

of struggle to those in higher education and broader society––the struggles for justice, liberation, 

and free expression on the bases of race, gender, sexuality, and economics. However, the sport’s 

worldview is quite culturally distinct from that of the modern university. Skateboarding 

celebrates cultural aberrance, critical thinking, and the questioning of authority for authority’s 

sake, all values that shape social movements for change and run counter to institutional policies 

and practices. Thus, despite the systemic challenges inherent to skate culture, the sport offers 

significant liberatory potential within the higher education environment. Beal et al. (2023) 

postulate that skateboarding is not inherently progressive, but it is almost certainly transgressive. 

Transgressiveness comes not from an outright rejection of social norms, systems, and practices, 

but from a willing extension of thought and behavior beyond their prescribed boundaries; a 

challenge to the assumption that these boundaries should exist in the first place. For those who 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   9 

are simultaneously interested in resisting the oppressive higher education status quo, yet hold 

affiliation with their institutions, the question of how to ontologically self-realize looms large. 

Institutions enact the spatial-natural imaginary to make both social ills and marginalized 

experiences invisible. In higher education, skateboarding is an act of rendering visible using 

insider knowledge of the campus environment and an outsider practice of observational 

performance to disclose concealed mechanisms of social control and oppression. 

One compelling argument regarding skateboarding’s transgressiveness asserts that “a 

skater can be both ‘in place’ and ‘out of place’ at the same time” (Nolan, 2003, p. 311). As I 

attempt to situate skateboarding and its participants within the higher education ecology, this 

may be the most apt argument with which to proceed. Students and other campus affiliates who 

skateboard exist simultaneously in multiple ecological realms. They are undoubtedly affiliated 

with their institutional and broader higher education cultures, yet also associate with a sport 

culture that encourages counterinterpretation of social environments. The sport’s reputation, 

either earned or perceived by mainstream society, as independent, countercultural, and 

transgressive often labels participants as threats to public order (Borden, 2001; Chiu, 2009; 

Dickinson et al., 2022; Nolan, 2003). Skaters typically occupy regulatory positions as 

pedestrians, whereas the other most common type of active transport, bicycles, are considered 

motor vehicles. Therefore, skateboards may not be permitted on roadways, but also may be 

restricted, either materially or temporally, from walk-only zones on campus given the perceived 

(unfounded) threat they pose to pedestrian safety. Thus, campus skaters’ positions are, due to the 

social and political structure of the campus-built environment, liminal by nature. Thus, 

skateboarders on campus are insider-outsiders; members whose spatial location within and 

impact upon the campus ecology is fluid. 

 

The Skater’s Ecological Orientation to Campus 

 

 The skater notices intrinsically what the trained higher education scholar does not. This 

is, of course, a generalization, yet critical gaps in the discipline’s literature show evidence to 

support such a statement. In the ensuing passages, I provide an analysis of the skateboarder’s 

ecological navigation of the university environment via a multidimensional framing of 

skateboarding participation. Affiliation with the sport renders visible elements of the campus 

ecology that stakeholders attempt to cloak from public scrutiny. In the following sections, I 

explore the various capacities in which the insider-outsider perspectives of skateboarding create 

modes of environmental interaction and interpretation unique to participants. 

 

Alternative Interpretations of Campus Environments 

 

 Given that physical infrastructures make up the necessary underpinnings of skateboarding 

as art and practice, skaters are heavily invested in the development of built environments, yet 

may care little for the intended use of these environments and whether or not they succeed on 

their own merits (McDuie-Ra, 2022). Rather, the skateboarding community is an adjacent 

infrastructural public, assessing infrastructure on the basis of its mis-use value and experiencing 

physical spaces differently than those for whom this infrastructure was developed (Collier et al., 

2016; McDuie-Ra, 2022). On university campuses, skaters’ membership in this adjacent public 

manifests in both practical and expressive capacities. Commuters or travelers occupy a liminal 

zone between infrastructures developed for pedestrians, bicycles, or cars, as campus 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   10 

transportation initiatives do not consider skateboarding as a present and viable modality (Fang & 

Handy, 2019; Jackson et al., 2018). More critically, skateboarding’s elements of play and 

performance have a transformative effect on the relationship between campus infrastructure and 

the individual. These infrastructures’ restrictions on car travel, broad open pathways, creative 

energies, and public gathering opportunities all position university grounds as ideal playgrounds 

with which to engage in both the material and social dimensions of skating practice. Rather than 

adhering to built environments’ nominal roles as engines of capital generation and sites of quiet 

leisure, skaters view them as “playgrounds,” where distinctive elements of the urban campus 

geography yield greater access and compatibility with the sport’s methods and improved 

opportunities for social engagement among fellow skaters (Aschenbrand, 2022; Woolley & 

Johns, 2001).  

As participants in a multi-sensate artistic and athletic practice, skateboarders constantly 

seek out new ways of interacting with physical space and its associated social environments, 

which allows them to see their university campus through the lens of a skilled, creative resident-

practitioner (Bäckström & Sand, 2019). They consider the skateability of the institution’s built 

environments as the primary metric of infrastructural quality and in doing so reconstitute the 

derivation of pleasure from these environments, simultaneously contributing to yet disrupting the 

campus’ existing organizational saga (Aschenbrand, 2022; Bäckström & Sand, 2019). This form 

of place-based resistant celebration challenges the notion of the academy as authoritarian, 

managerial, ideally constituted, and functionally ordered (Glenney & Mull, 2018). Sensate 

relationships between the material worlds of the university and the embodied performances of 

the skater can even construct novel social realities for the campus community (Maier, 2016); 

transgressing the prescribed rhythms of the spatial-natural imaginary. In these capacities, the 

skater moves though the college campus with a kind of “elemental wildness” (Glenney & Mull, 

2018, p. 442), creating a new, more fluid anthropological rhythm of the higher education 

environment (Glenney & O’Connor, 2022).  

In most cases, the spaces which skaters traverse were designed with ritualism or legacy in 

mind, as temples to intellectual or athletic achievement, particularly within a white, Western, 

masculine framing. Institutional memoryscapes such as stadia, monuments, landmarks, or other 

physical components of the university saga contribute to skaters’ abilities to reorder, transgress, 

and simultaneously celebrate public spaces in a playful capacity (Glenney & Mull, 2018; 

McDuie-Ra, 2021; O’Connor, 2018). In particular, student skateboarding participants express 

both their identities as skaters and members of the campus community by mis-using these 

memoryscapes to explore dual polarities––resistors of institutional norms, yet contributors to 

institutional memories (Manan & Smith, 2014; McDuie-Ra, 2021). As members of their 

institutional communities, skaters likely circulate amongst themselves mythical places apart from 

what campus stakeholders consider significant (Manan & Smith, 2014; McDuie-Ra, 2021; 

O’Connor, 2018), as well as defy leadership’s preordained expectations of reverence and 

deference toward certain monuments. Banal architectural features, quiet courtyards, and hidden 

pathways through campus all contribute to an institution’s ecology of skateboarding, 

demonstrating how the historic and emotional art of placemaking is embedded into the sport and 

its participants (O’Connor, 2018). The extent to which alternative uses of institutional spaces and 

resources pose a threat to the actual operations of U.S. universities is indeterminate. However, 

institutional leadership’s significant focus on maintaining a relatively rigid social order and a 

pervasive organizational saga definitely influence the ways in which certain types of behaviors 

are encouraged or constrained; how challenges to institutional values, histories, or figureheads 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   11 

are received. Subtextually, important components of the institutional saga may represent white 

supremacy, industriousness, Western ascendancy, settler colonialism, or state violence. It is 

critical for higher education scholarship to seek alternative perspectives on which spaces within 

the university environment should be considered central and how scholarly examinations into 

these spaces should interrogate the priorities of the dominant order. 

 

Differentiated Patterns of Semiosis 

 

Skateboarding has a long history of interactions with the legal and political systems in the 

United States; in many cases these interactions are antagonistic in nature. Thus, the skater’s 

navigational lens within “public” spaces operates differently than those outside the sport. 

Universities’ investments in the maintenance of (imagined) public safety and capital assets lead 

to a policy structure undergirded by the assumption that skateboarding is disruptive to the 

campus community (Jackson et al., 2018). From early design phases through construction of 

built environments, campus planners and administrators engage with “defensive architectural 

tactics” (Howell, 2001, p. 1) for deterring skateboarding including skatestoppers (Dickinson et 

al., 2022). In maintaining existing facilities, universities set policies and novel physical barriers 

intended to protect the intended-use value of campus property (Carr, 2010). In traversing their 

environments, skateboarders engage in vigilant observations of hostile architecture, a concept 

that is all but absent from the scholarly conversation in higher education. While features like 

skatestoppers directly target skating, other examples of hostile architecture disclose the ways in 

which universities maintain the spatial-natural imaginary. For example, benches with regular 

armrests designed to prevent unhoused people from resting tacitly communicate that only those 

who engage with campus spaces in an intended-use capacity––that is, contribute to the regular 

flows of capital production––are entitled to free use of the institution’s physical infrastructure. 

Thus, skateboarding offers education scholars with a semiotic lens through which to critically 

examine institutional design choices. 

 Infrastructure communicates both inclusive and exclusionary messages to the observer. In 

the case of skateboarding, the university welcomes participation via the implementation of 

skateboard racks in living, learning, and community spaces. Painted or posted signifiers akin to 

the bicyclist symbol also present campus transportation infrastructure as encouraging to skaters 

and removes anxieties about legal repercussions toward participation. Conversely, skatestoppers 

demonstrate an institutional commitment to protectionism and prohibition (Howell, 2001). The 

commonplace nature of signs prohibiting skateboarding in certain spaces operate in a much less 

clearly delineated capacity than elements constructed to expressly permit or deter the practice. 

Skateboarding’s intrinsic resistance to authority causes many participants to ignore or actively 

defy these signs (Nolan, 2003); universities may post them on campus as a signifier of safety to 

members of the campus community with negative perceptions of the sport. Safety discourses 

abound as a means of determining who is welcome on campus and to what extent; these 

discourses reinforce the spatial-natural imaginary and justify protectionist policing practices, 

particularly toward quality-of-life crimes.  

These crimes encompass a wide range of social behaviors, including skateboarding. 

Many campuses have policies to prevent the performance of skate tricks (Jackson et al., 2018). 

Skateboarders may ignore these policies to take advantage of the mis-use value of institutional 

property, leading to tension between campus authorities and skaters, which is magnified by the 

abstract physical and cultural threats of skateboarding to the campus (Borden, 2001; Carr, 2010 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   12 

McDuie-Ra, 2022). Thus, the campus policy climate regarding skateboarding ranges from 

lukewarm to cold. Institutions without formal policies restricting skateboarding do little to 

encourage it as a mode of transportation or practice of wellbeing, and those with formal policies 

typically take a punitive approach, particularly toward street skating’s supposed criminality, 

danger to others, and propensity for property destruction (Fang & Handy, 2019; Jackson et al., 

2018). Motivated by their perceptions of skateboarding as dangerous and skaters as inconsiderate 

and reckless, university police departments strictly enforce these policies through confiscation of 

skateboards and removal of skaters from campus grounds. Given the connection between racism 

and campus policing, officers likely target Skaters of Color with greater frequency, contributing 

to the criminalization of Black, Indigenous, and Brown existence on campus (Dizon, 2021; 

Smith, 2007). Skaters’ insider-outsider awareness of surveillance and deterrence offers an 

abolitionist perspective. While Communities of Color, immigrant communities, and transient 

communities have endured heightened surveillance and harassment from law enforcement for 

generations, white, socioeconomically, and politically privileged scholars and practitioners 

would do well to question how the policing of leisure, alcohol and drug use, spatial 

encroachment, and “disorderly” conduct advance institutional arguments for funding and 

maintaining hostile law enforcement agencies and encourage a misguided white public 

perception of higher education as an ordered space free from social ills. 

 

Disruptions to the Flow of Capital Generation 

 

Examinations into skateboarding on college campuses estimate that the most widespread 

motivation for participation is transportation (Fang & Handy, 2019; Jackson et al., 2018; Walker, 

2013). Although relatively uncommon compared to other primary modes of travel into, within, 

and out of higher education spaces, “skating to school” offers several benefits above and beyond 

these modes. Those who choose skating as their mode of transportation in college appreciate 

how skateboards provide the user with an active transportation method that is frequently more 

convenient, less expensive, and less mechanically complex than bicycles (Fang & Handy, 2019). 

The ability of the skater to take their transportation mode with them into most campus spaces 

eliminates the need to find adequate storage or parking that is present among cyclists and drivers 

(Fang & Handy, 2019). Additionally, skating aligns with campus initiatives to promote active 

transportation among students and other affiliates on both ecological and wellness grounds 

(Corwin et al., 2019b; Jackson et al., 2018). Despite these benefits, colleges and universities 

typically do not engage skateboarding in transportation initiatives, leaving participants to create 

novel physical pathways through transit networks designed for other modalities. 

 Compared to users of other transportation modes, college skaters consider the fact that 

their mode is fun to be the most important influencing factor in mode choice rather than 

convenience or cost (Fang & Handy, 2019; Seifert & Hedderson, 2010). I argue that students 

who skate to and from their institutions utilize their inside-outsider perspectives, considering 

campus transit from an adjacent lens (McDuie-Ra, 2022). In navigating campus transit networks, 

the commuting skater traverses multiple urban terrains, pedestrian, auto, and bicycle, in order to 

determine the most efficient, creative, and enjoyable routes to their destinations rather than 

following a prescribed infrastructural and semiotic pathway (Bäckström & Sand, 2019; Chiu, 

2009; Borden, 2001). They develop a highly self-reflective, growth-oriented method of campus 

navigation and consider the physical environment’s optimum transit potential based on its 

capacity for skateboarding rhythm and flow (Chiu, 2009; Seifert & Hedderson, 2010). This 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   13 

reinforces the idea of skateboarding as “an act of spatial reinterpretation” (Walker, 2013, p. 15), 

a reordering of seemingly inflexible built environments into a dynamic and fluid ecosystem that 

delivers both practical and spiritual benefits to the participant (Aschenbrand, 2022; Vivoni, 

2013).  

 Similarly, the choice to skate on campus represents an implicit rejection of the academic 

capitalist strategies that undergird institutional transportation initiatives. Transportation programs 

frequently act as revenue-generating auxiliaries, relying on the necessity of car travel and 

parking scarcity to charge affiliates––particularly students––for the ability to move to, from, and 

within campus. However, skateboarding transgresses the institutional capitalist climate as 

skateboards do not require payable storage, nor do they depend on spatial security and fineable 

enforcement policies like cars. Skaters do not contribute to the pollutive enterprise of fossil fuels, 

in which many U.S. institutions are invested (Barron et al., 2023; Whitford, 2021). As a 

discordant practice, skateboarding disrupts the ordinary rhythms of capital generation by taking 

advantage of spontaneous celebration and temporal disjuncture (Borden, 2001; Carr, 2010; 

Glenney & O’Connor, 2022). For example, the skater making their commute longer to enjoy 

specific components of the campus infrastructure en route to their destination constitutes an 

oppositional perspective to the “time-is-money” productivity culture of U.S. universities. This 

type of leisurely disruption may invite resistance from campus actors heavily invested in 

maintaining and reinforcing regularly scheduled capital production. Additionally, 

skateboarding’s countercultural roots play out in unapologetic mis-uses of public and private 

spaces and assets, frequently in direct defiance of legal and economic authorities in charge of 

controlling them (Dinces, 2011; McDuie-Ra, 2022; Nolan, 2003) From this perspective, I argue 

that skateboarding provides sites of resistance to late capitalism at the institutional level via 

skaters’ discordant social and performative practices (Dinces, 2011; Glenney & O’Connor, 2022; 

McDuie-Ra, 2022; Nolan, 2003). 

 

Skateboarding’s Challenges to the Dominant Order 

 

The prior sections of this writing have articulated (1) the ecological spheres in which 

higher education and skateboarding exist and interact with one another and (2) the uniquely 

attuned ways in which college skaters navigate their position within those ecological spheres. I 

now turn to the sport’s multidisciplinary body of literature to draw connections between 

empirical and scholarly understandings of the sport to issues of social justice in higher education. 

 

Race and Indigeneity 

 

In examining Communities of Color, a clear connection exists between higher education 

experiences and skateboarding participation. Groups of Color in the United States’ navigation of 

institutional and social environments is indisputably informed by their racial backgrounds 

(Patton et al., 2016; Williams, 2020). College Skaters of Color must maneuver through both 

institutional and skate cultures invested in the reproduction of whiteness and co-opting of Black 

culture (Gusa, 2010; Williams, 2020). However, skating offers numerous sites of resistance to 

white racially dominant systems and narratives at universities. Skateboarding participation can 

act as counterstorytelling since the sport’s “informal nature … create[s] the opportunity to 

challenge or adhere to the broader pressures of racialized norms, offering the prospect for 

empowerment” (Williams, 2020, p. 324). Skaters of Color reject the white institutional norms of 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   14 

conduct, behavior, and being via spatial reclamation and reconstitution of campus spaces into 

sites of play and celebration (Tichavakunda, 2021). Additionally, Skaters of Color offer a 

challenge to performative institutional diversity, equity, and inclusion discourses via the creative, 

sensate practice of skateboarding which highlights their centrality in a campus environment that 

seeks to render them invisible. 

 Skateboarding offers a pathway toward decolonizing and Indigenizing higher education 

due to its alternative engagements with dominant understandings of physical environments 

(Borden, 2001; Fisher, 2017). Native American activism has been central to shifting the 

ontological understandings of space and place in the U.S. tertiary system, and skateboarding 

contributes to these understandings because “it is intimately connected to, and in conversation 

with, the landscape” (Fisher, 2017, p. 58). U.S. universities reside on stolen Native land, and 

Indigenous skaters on campus have the power to “utilize skateboarding to express sovereignty on 

and within their land” (Fisher, 2017, p. 58) in opposition to these institutions’ land occupation. In 

addition, Asian Pacific American participation in skateboarding recaptures the sport’s 

Indigenous Pacific roots in surfing and its early adoption and development among the Asian 

American diasporic communities of Southern California (Sueyoshi, 2015). For Asian Pacific 

Islanders, skateboarding is a mode of expressing, not requesting, belongingness, highlighting the 

integral role of these communities in the social ecology of the United States and therefore higher 

education (Sueyoshi, 2015). Black skateboarders use the sport to enact rebellion against 

racialized norms and crime culture as well as enhance their commitments to intellectual 

development and personal growth in both formal and informal capacities (Corwin et al., 2019a; 

Edwards, 2015; Williams, 2020). Many Black skaters also center reflectiveness and nonviolence 

in their practices as a means of refusing ghettoization by the white-dominant state authority and 

policing systems (Edwards, 2015; Williams, 2020). This “subculture of rebellion” (Edwards, 

2015, p. 40) is a powerful means for Black campus skaters to claim their rights to liberation and 

education in an institutional environment that views them as unwelcome. Latinx2 skaters report 

increased self-efficacy and educational confidence as a result of participation in skateboarding, 

and use the sport to develop their senses of perseverance in the face of significant odds (Corwin 

et al., 2019a). While white claims of ownership over culture and space abound in higher 

education and skateboarding alike, these cultural groups’ skating on campus reveals the racist 

logics behind these claims and offers counterperspectives to the white institutional majority.  

 

Gender and Sexuality 

 

Given the higher rates of skateboard participation by college men and the gender 

dynamics present in both skateboarding and higher education, women skaters are significantly 

more salient on campus than their male counterparts. Female skateboarders occupy a 

marginalized position within the hyper-independent, hypermasculine culture of the sport, so their 

participation alone is an act of gendered performance (Atencio et al., 2009; Bäckström, 2013; 

Abulhawa, 2008). Women “write themselves into” (Abulhawa, 2008. p. 59) skating in a manner 

similar to their agentic resistance to exclusion in the collegiate environment; in this way, college 

women who skate are engaged in a doubly subversive performance of gender. Female 

skateboarders navigate their status as co-eds in the chauvinistic American university culture and 

 
2 There is disagreement over the use of “Latinx” in its associated communities. While the term is imperfect and 

language-context dependent, I employ it here based on its familiarity to U.S. audiences and the absence of another 

term in that context that accounts for the range of gender identities in the Latin diaspora. 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   15 

their simultaneous engagement with the “pariah femininities” (Bäckström, 2013, pp. 33, 40) 

associated with their participation in skateboarding. Skateboarding media and college-culture 

social networks sexualize women’s bodies, challenge women’s intellectual capacities and human 

potential, and enforce rigid norms of gender and sexuality expression (Abulhawa, 2008; Patton et 

al., 2016). Community building efforts among groups of women skateboarding participants have 

created sites of resistance to these problematic cultural forces, establishing a positive womens’ 

skate culture neither defined by nor centered within its masculine norms (Atencio et al., 2009; 

MacKay & Dallaire, 2013, 2014). In the campus environment, women skaters assert their right to 

spatial engagement, challenge their institutions’ hierarchical gender orders, and establish room to 

enact different femininities (Bäckström, 2013).  

 Skateboarding has the potential to offer “a capacity to imagine and enact alternatives 

outside of the expectations and pressures of the dominant social order” (Geckle & Shaw, 2020, p. 

132). In this way, the very act of skateboarding on college campuses is an act of Queerness, of 

simply challenging the hegemonic social order of the higher education environment. 

Unfortunately, the hetero-masculine foundations of the sport frequently require Queer skaters to 

choose between marginalization due to their authentic expressions of their identities, or tentative 

acceptance into skate culture by relegating their identities to obscurity (Geckle & Shaw, 2020). 

In a similar fashion, college and university environments enforce strict boundaries of gender and 

sexuality expression, relegating Queer members of the campus community to a peripheral 

position within the campus culture (Patton et al., 2016). Thus, Queer collegiate skaters engage in 

acts of resistance not only within the traditional modalities of their sport, but also in the defiant 

performativity of skating while Queer in the university environment, which disrupts hegemonic 

notions of the sexed/gendered academic landscape while offering transformative glimpses into 

future ways of being on campus (Geckle & Shaw, 2020).  

 

Institutional Culture 

 

While relatively day-to-day engagements with skateboarding characterize the sport’s 

presence in higher education ecology, it is critical to consider the social-philosophical elements 

that skating imprints upon participants. Namely, the collective set of cultural practices and 

worldviews that identify someone as a skater play a role in how they conceptualize themselves 

based on their affiliations with these cultural practices and their subsequent associated 

interactions with the surrounding environment. Despite public and institutional perceptions of 

skateboarding frequently tending toward the negative, the social values common across the sport 

align well with higher education and community development. Skateboarding relies on a balance 

between self-reliance and social engagement. As a highly individual and self-determined 

activity, skating allows the participant to move from space to space freely without a formalized 

authority structure (Beal & Weidman, 2003). Additionally, skateboarding contributes to 

participants’ intrinsic motivation (Seifert & Hedderson, 2010) and affinity for skill development 

(Corwin et al., 2019b). Skaters practice these skills on their own, but just as importantly seek 

support from and reliance on multigenerational informal communities of other skaters who 

provide encouragement and advice (Haines et al., 2010; Woolley & Johns, 2001). Additionally, 

skaters frequently identify themselves as observant nonconformists with values, perspectives, 

and experiences outside those of the mainstream (Beal & Weidman, 2003). When skateboarders 

bring these three interwoven abilities––individualism, cooperation, and criticality––into the 

college environment, they bring a uniquely fine-tuned set of tools to help them and their peers 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   16 

succeed academically and socially. Skateboarding’s longstanding activism work in the realms of 

counterculture, public space, social marginalia, and alternative aesthetics benefits universities’ 

much-needed efforts to widen their epistemological frameworks, challenge dominant 

perceptions, and seek inclusion for diverse populations (Glover et al., 2019; Németh, 2006; 

Vivoni, 2013).  

 

Imagining Skate Futures in Higher Education 

 

Skateboarding’s embeddedness in the campus ecology of U.S. higher education provides 

scholars, educators, and skaters alike with opportunities to improve the skateboarding conditions 

at universities. Such improvements have the potential to bring about systemic change in higher 

education on a number of levels. In order to realize these improvements, there is much more 

scholars and practitioners need to understand about skateboarding on campus. Future research 

should consider the following arenas, among others.  

 

New Directions for Research 

 

First, there is a need for qualitative, first-hand inquiry into college skaters’ experiences, 

particularly Skaters of Color, Queer skaters, and women, who are under-examined in and 

underserved by both the higher education and skateboarding literatures. This work can provide 

greater insight into the insider-outsider worldviews of college skaters and how their experiences 

are both centered and peripheral in the campus environment. Second, critical analyses of campus 

discourses on skateboarding will help researchers and practitioners alike understand the campus 

climate surrounding skateboarding as well as provide insight into how to change negative 

perceptions of the sport. Third, continued examinations of skateboarding as campus practice and 

performance will aid the development and promotion of inclusive, welcoming campus 

infrastructure networks and call attention to the harmful effects of the spatial-natural imaginary, 

holding institutions to account. Finally, as an ultimate goal, any research into skateboarding and 

American higher education must contribute to broader abolition and decolonization movements 

within both fields. 

 

Concluding Arguments 

University students at large engage in a constant push-pull between the demands of 

college and their senses of self and wellbeing. As an unstructured, self-directed practice, 

skateboarding carries a liberatory ontological and epistemological quality that separates it from 

other campus activities and cultures. Therefore, participants can employ skating as a kind of 

reclamation of the campus environment, freeing them (even momentarily) from the rigid, 

hierarchical structure of their institution and its associated stressors. Additionally, skateboarding 

invites institutions to shift their view of student success from “resilience” and “grit” in the face 

of an unchangeable, oppressive academic climate toward creative expression and placemaking as 

paramount modes of transforming university culture toward inclusivity and responsiveness. As 

mentioned in the opening passages of this writing, formal relationships between higher education 

institutions and the skateboarding community are extremely rare, so these dynamics of 

interaction between campuses and skaters typically occur without dialogue between the parties 

save for the occasional conflict between skaters and law enforcement. However, as the 

scholarship on skateboarding suggests, opportunities for universities to leverage skating as a 



Davidson: Insider Knowledge, Outsider Practice 

Current Issues in Education, 25(2)   17 

practice of wellbeing or mode of sustainable transportation should be plentiful (e.g., Corwin et 

al., 2019a; Fang & Handy, 2019). Future research and writing should elaborate on these 

opportunities, including the ways in which the authority-averse skateboarding community might 

enact or respond to formal relationships with institutions. I conclude by offering words of 

knowledge from a group of diverse college skaters and advocates at the University of California, 

San Diego (Skateboarding at UCSD, n.d.): 

● Skateboarding can be a positive influence on the student population and should not be 

treated as an act of rebellion.  

● It is an activity which you can meet people instantly.  

● Skateboarding brings all kinds of people together. 

● Skateboarding is great because it is something you can do all afternoon or it is something 

you can do on a study break, but most importantly it is best to do with friends.  

● It will always keep you motivated to improve your own skills. 

● The sport also promotes self-expression and creativity. 

● It is such a variable sport and hobby that the possibilities are endless. 

As critical evaluations and changemaking initiatives of higher education attempt to expand the 

flexibility of the campus environment, university skaters offer an insider-outsider model for how 

this can be accomplished. As insiders, they are intimately familiar with their home institutions as 

students, but also possess additional embodied, experiential knowledge of their campuses vis-à-

vis their non-skating peers. As outsiders, they maintain critical lenses of navigation and 

interaction with their institutions that counter normal rhythms of capital generation and social 

marginalization. Using these perspectives, skateboarding participant-advocates can take an active 

role in disrupting systems of dominion and oppression, promote skating on campus, celebrate the 

sport’s role in shaping college culture, and improve educational experiences for all. 

 

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Author Notes 

Eric M. Davidson 

ORCiD: 0000-0002-1072-0680 

University of California, Riverside 

eric.davidson@email.ucr.edu  

 

 

 

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