Gregory J. Snyder is Associate Professor of Sociology at Baruch College, City University of New York. He is the author of Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’s Urban Underground.
"While Skateboarding LA is not the first ethnography of the sport,
it can rightfully claim to be the most rigorous and in depth of the
existing literature … Throughout the book, Snyder critiques
previous research that has assumed subcultures like skateboarding
are uniformly about youthful resistance to the demands of capital.
Instead, he approaches the sport as a production process."
*American Journal of Sociology*
"A personal and descriptive ethnographic ac¬count of how male
skaters based in the street and associated industries continue in
their various attempts to progress the sport … Snyder’s depiction
of spatial usage, capital codes and benefits, as well as communal
activism found within today’s neo-liberal skateboarding scene is
compelling."
*Canadian Journal of Sociology*
"An intensive and engaging study, written in vivid detail and
supported by copious numbers of photographs."
*Social Forces*
"A rigorously researched and richly rendered ethnography of
skateboarding that takes us beyond the acrobatics, lingo, and
lifestyles of its elite practitioners into the economics and
subcultural dynamics of the scene, and its forays into political
activism and sense of community. The readers perception of skating
is flipped like the proverbial board. Far from & skate punks, &
pros are elite athletes and their friends and collaborators are
engines of new-media creativity. Gregory Snyder has done it again,
producing another iconic study of a key subculture and in the
process offers nothing less than a meditation on the nature of
career, work and life."
*Jonathan Ilan,Author of Understanding Street Culture: Poverty,
Crime, Youth, and Cool*
"The magic by which street skateboarders execute impossible aerial
tricks is wrapped in another kind of magic: their ability to
transform the most mundane of urban spaces into open-air theaters
of collective performance. Snyder is hip to both sorts of magic,
and because he is, Skateboarding LA is a thing of beauty: urban
sociology on four wheels, cultural criminology on the fly, and
ethnography at its best"
*Jeff Ferrell,Author of Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban
Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, an*
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