From the Street to the Stadium and Back Again? The Neoliberalisation of Skateboarding

This project seeks to critically analyse how the inclusion of skateboarding in the Olympics games will affect the subculture's coherence and community, and its relationship with urban governance. The contention here is that this inclusion represents further entrenchment of the neoliberal regime within the skateboarding subculture. As such, this project will exemplify the effect of neoliberalisation on urban subcultural activities more generally, including how they may change or adapt to the new urban spaces that are created. A three-pronged analytical frame is proposed, each of which is a key characteristic of neoliberal thought: competition, exploring how increased competition may impact upon the social behaviour of urban skateboarder; mediation, concerned with the extent to which global corporate mediation of skateboarding creates resistance in the urban scale community, and finally identity politics, examining if inclusion of skateboarding in the Olympic Games has an effect on socio-economic identities. Together, these three combined will offer a conceptual analysis of how the spaces and practices of skateboarding will respond to its neoliberalisation via its inclusion into the Olympic Games. The project will be highly involved methodologically, adopting interviews and an in-depth ethnographic approach in two key sites - London and Tokyo