ABSTRACT
Drawing from two long-term ethnographic studies on skateboarding, this chapter will discuss skateboarding as a spatial and multi-sensorial practice where learning and knowing is formed along pathways of movement. I will particularly focus on bowl riding, which is a certain type of skateboarding practice taking place in so called pools or bowls. The ability to practice bowl riding successfully, requires technical skills which include engaging with material transitions and smooth surfaces, balancing on a moving skateboard, and constantly shifting bodily position. It requires both emplaced knowing and moving. I will address how this skillful mobility and perceptive competence is expressed in two ways: 1) through verbal explanations and 2) as informally demonstrated by bowl riding skateboarders. The research informing this chapter is located in the emerging field of movement culture studies. Theoretically, it is positioned in the intersecting space of anthropology, human geography and pedagogy inspired by recent arguments of a shift from embodiment to emplacement. Consequentially, the conceptualization of a moving body in a moving world, i.e. emplaced via its senses in a sociocultural and spatiotemporal environment, requires re-thinking regarding how bodies in context knows, teaches and, learns.
