The State of Skate Studies 2025

Purpose and Inquiry

Welcome to the third edition of the State of Skate Studies. For those unfamiliar with what we get up to here, skate studies is an interdisciplinary community of scholars that takes skateboarding seriously. Maybe too seriously. Some analyze it as a culture or lifestyle, others as a sport or leisure activity. Most agree that skateboarding initiates all kinds of novel things, from spatial design and rhythms to technologies and pedagogies, urban activities, and progressive, horizontal social groupings, all on the edge of social norms. 

The “State of Skate Studies” aims to bring together as much of that scholarly work as possible into one handy, easy-to-navigate resource, along with some analysis and takeaways from the 2025 studies. Take a scroll through all the publications below and click on a link if a title catches your eye. Really smart people, including you, seem to care a lot about skateboarding.

2025 Overview: Trends

The publication data from 141 scholarly books and papers in 2025 suggests three new trends in how skate scholars are thinking about skateboarding and collectively organizing around it. 

• 2025 is the year of the study of skate culture, marking a continued shift away from a “core” study theme of skateboarding’s “spatial appropriation” initiated in 2001 with the publication of Iain Borden’s book, Skateboarding, Space, and the City.
• More than half of the 141 papers written in 2025 are found in edited book volumes (54 papers) and special journal issues (18), collectively organized by various skate scholars, including one edited book entirely in German. (Time to brush up on your Deutsche!)
• 2025 is seeing an increase in anthropological scene reports, such as what skate culture is like in a city in Brazil or Bolivia, or the local history of skateboarding in a country like Uruguay. Many of these are written in local languages, making them difficult to access for English speakers, while also revealing the cultural specificity of such insights. (Google Translate, please.)

These three points suggest that skate scholars are taking seriously the fact that skateboarding is a global culture, i.e. “seriously” global. And global skateboarding benefits from non-Northern and non-Western skateboarding being taken seriously: different cultures skate differently. To see this seriously global study, check that ‘hockey-stick’ increase in skate culture studies of skateboarding in the graph below (purple).

The Skate Studies Scene: Events

2025 was another robust year for the collective scene of skate scholarship. That includes 15 graduate student theses in skateboarding from around the globe. Some are Bachelor’s and others Master’s degrees, but more than half are PhD Dissertations. Big ups to these new skate scholars! Welcome to the show. Theses are marked below with “*”.

There were also a number of skate conferences, of varying size and focus, in 2025:

While there is not a dedicated publisher or journal for skate scholarship (though there are whispers in San Diego), there were three journal “Special Issues” dedicated to skate studies in 2025 (the first two overlapping with 2024): 

In 2025, three edited volumes from academic publishers featured a set of papers by a crew of skate scholars. These authors are usually included by invite only, and, to be honest, getting an invite to a special issue is rare and feels very grand:

Last, but also first, are the skate scholars who basically crushed the year by publishing their own book. There were four monograph books in skate studies for 2025:

Skate Studies as Part of Skate Culture

The scholarly study of skateboarding is part of skate culture, at least for the skaters who work in it. What I mean is that for a skater, skate studies takes on a meaning similar to its subject of study. This suggestion has a very specific parallel: the feeling of publishing a scholarly piece on skateboarding is akin to a skater putting out a video part or having a photo in a skate magazine. 

That may be a bit obvious, as some scholarly work is also published in popular skate media. (Thanks to Paul O’Connor for pushing me on this point.) Ted Barrow’s This Old Ledge is published by Thrasher, so this scholarly historiography of architectural designs is both a scholarly product (do you put this on your CV, Ted?) and a skate part. This is similar to publishing in Cole Nowicki’s Simple Magic and Farran Golding’s Skate ByLines: skater-produced skate media hosting highbrow poetic, literary, and journalistic readings of skate happenings, written by skaters. Thom Callan-Riley published a piece on skateboarding in The Observer, Willy Staley did the same in the New York Times Magazine, and they both skate. Indigo Willing gets promo’d in Slam, as certainly Quentin Delille’s brilliant podcast Beyond Boards syncs the skate scholars with skate pros as if they do the same thing. With Ryan Lay and Leo Valls putting on the biggest skate culture gatherings ever, it seems there’s no real way to distinguish what it is to do skateboarding and what it is to think and talk about it. It’s all a big ol’ pot of cultural stew, brewing up for anyone hungry.

So, a question for Ryan Lay: is putting on a Slow Impact as meaningful as putting out a part? Maybe let us know in Simple Magic, but you’ll have to tell us if publishing there is also similarly meaningful. Maybe the lines blur so easily because writing, talking, taking photos, filming, editing, building and maintaining spots, and then skating them, are just different ways of doing the same magical thing. Kyle Beachy once said that for him, writing is skating. We know that Kyle is right, but that does not mean we, much less Kyle, know what it means.

While this parallel of felt meanings between putting out writing about skating and putting out skating video parts and clips was mentioned around a decade ago by Gregory Snyder in his 2017 book, Skateboarding LA: Inside Professional Street Skateboarding, it is largely an undiscussed but very potent aspect of skate studies. And it is tempting to push this idealized parallel by listing hierarchies of meaning: a manuscript is like a video part, a published book a signature-model skateboard, the publisher the author’s sponsor who turned them PRO AF.

These parallels are not perfect, but the associated meanings are significant nonetheless; legacies are cemented, popularity refined, and more importantly, scholars feel they have contributed “to the culture” when they publish their work. Skate scholars want to feel like they are part of the skateboarding world, so, like other skaters, they seek to make a living by pursuing their skate lifestyle through academia. A more cynical description might frame the skate scholar’s work as “prestige labour”: rather than building fiscal capital, skate legacy is created and maintained by publishing on skating. 

Totalling the number of papers a scholar publishes on skateboarding is a lazy way to rank their efforts, especially since when a paper is published in academia is quite arbitrary, but to see the association of scholars with other scholars who inspire your work feels very fulfilling. The following is a list of skate scholars with two or more publications this year. And yes, Indigo Willing is the 2025 SSSOTY (Skate Scholar Skater Of The Year).

Perhaps the parallel between skate scholarship and skate culture stops at linking “books” with “parts,” but there may be more equivalencies (≈) to ponder and promote in skate studies by skaters that add meaning and momentum to its variegated activities. In conclusion, consider this Jenkem-like “industry skater ≈ skate scholar” top 10.

The 2025 Report

This report includes an exhaustive list of 141 articles (books, peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, etc.) published in 2025 (slightly down from 144 articles in 2024) that uniquely contribute to skateboarding’s understanding. Scan the list and feel free to email me with any criticism, oversights, and other reactions at bglenney@norwich.edu. As in the 2024 and 2023 reports, I categorize the articles into four genres, with three subgenres, and specify the unique disciplines of scholars in these areas. The genres, subgenres, and disciplines are listed as follows:

I. Spatial Appropriation and Urban Studies

(Architecture, Criminal Justice, Geography, Sociology, Urban Planning, Urban Studies, Youth Studies)

Skate studies is dominated by discussion of skateboarding’s unique appropriation of space, its effects on the city, and the city’s often hostile response. This area remains the centrepiece of skate studies, with skateboarding being largely defined by its in situ urbanity, even as recreational facilities draw skaters to suburban parks and sport cultures invest in arenas and institutionalizing contests.

(23 articles in 2025  / 18 articles in 2024 / 34 articles in 2023)

Senses and Phenomenology

This subgenre in skate studies puts a sensory spin on skating’s use of the city, suggesting that skateboarders possess uniquely tuned senses that are entrained on ways to experience the city, unlike the ambling pedestrian.

(8 articles in 2025 / 4 articles in 2024 / 7 articles in 2023)

II. Skate Culture Studies 

(Anthropology, Economics, Education, Leisure Studies, Religious Studies, Philosophy, Sociology)

Skateboarding is often viewed as a lifestyle with a global following, with local customs often informed by its history of masculine tendencies, gradually shifting toward socially progressive inclusion and diversity across race, gender, orientation, and disability.

(33 articles in 2025 / 22 articles in 2024 / 22 articles in 2023)

Activism, Inclusion, and Diversity 

Progressive, inclusive social and political values for non-traditional skateboarders have become a significant cultural marker of skateboarding, particularly in contrast to its hegemonic masculine origins. This subgenre of Cultural Studies research is of particular importance in skateboarding’s social achievements.

(22 articles in 2025 / 33 articles in 2024 / 20 articles in 2023)

III. Sport, Fitness, and Injury 

(Business, Exercise Science, Medicine, Sport Studies, Occupational/Physical Therapy)

Skateboarding’s athleticism, training regimes, and related pro-social aspects are lately being observed and supported by more institutionalized programs, including educational and “sport for development.”

(28 articles in 2025 / 41 articles in 2024 / 29 articles in 2023)

Sport for Development

An offshoot of sport institutionalized programs that have an educational and socialization focus rather than an athletic one.

IV. Design and Technology

(Computer Science, Education, Engineering, Math, Medicine, Physics)

As with other sports and recreation activities, there’s a burgeoning literature on novel technologies that aid athleticism, injury prevention, and pedagogies for skateboarding.

(9 articles in 2025  / 17 articles in 2024 / 13 articles in 2023)