Lecture | Research Seminar
‘In the heel, not the head’: the sensory know-how of skateboarders
- Sander Hölsgens, Brian Glenney & Adelina Ong
- Date
- Monday 10 March 2025
- Time
- Series
- CADS Research Seminars
- Location
-
Pieter de la Court
Wassenaarseweg 52
2333 AK Leiden - Room
- SA11
What a skater sees, hears, feels, and smells is a study in contrast: a feast of sweet adrenaline and a bitter quinine of injury, surveillance, and hostility. This talk chronicles the diverse ways skaters move and their revolutionary drive for political action. From a community-wide love for curbs to the risky and deviant act of hill bombing, skaters develop a felt and arrhythmic knowledge of the city. We conceptualise this knowledge as a “city craft” – an entanglement of emplaced knowledge, horizontal apprenticeship, and antirank pleasure. A skater's craft, we show, is located in the bruised heels and hurting toes and scabbed elbows, not just in the intellectual head.
This talk coincides with the release of “Skateboarding and the Senses: Skills, Surfaces, and Spaces” (Hölsgens and Glenney, 2024) and “Skate/Worlds: New Pedagogies for Skateboarding” (Hölsgens and Ong, eds., 2025).
About Sander Hölsgens
Sander Hölsgens is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology of Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is a co-director of Pushing Boarders, a platform and international conference tracing the social impact of skateboarding worldwide. His popular writing on skateboarding has appeared in Skateism, Vice, and Jenkem. Together with Miriam Waltz and Mandy de Wilde, he currently runs the research project "Tracing pollution: practicing the anthropology of the more-than-human" (2023–2029).
About Brian Glenney
Brian Glenney is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Norwich University. He received his PhD in Philosophy from the School of Philosophy at the University of South California. Before that he earned a Master’s degree at St. Andrews University and a Bachelor’s degree at University of Washington. He is the co-author of Skateboarding and the Senses published by Routledge, 2024. He also works in the field of spatial justice, with several peer-reviewed articles on skateboarding. His recent focus concerns environmental issues in skateboarding with the research initiative “Skating, Sustainability, Health, Research, Environmental Design (SSHRED)”.
About Adelina Ong
Adelina Ong is an independent applied performance researcher who has been working with young people from low-income families in Singapore (2003 to present) and London. Her practice is inspired by placemaking practices like skateboarding and Death Cafes. She has published in TRI and Research in Drama Education (RiDE).