ABSTRACT
Skateboarding is a mystery. It looks like an austere practice, a tool for social good, a discipline of failure. It presents itself as a subculture, an Olympic sport, a slice of masculinity, an embodied pedagogy. So, what are the skills needed to become a skater? This chapter zooms in on the things skateboards do—how these devices twist and turn, scratch the surfaces of architectural furniture, become one with their users. It positions sensory ethnography as a set of approaches and sensibilities well-equipped for studying how skaters learn to see, listen, and move. The overarching aim is threefold: first, to draw useful connections between the phenomenology of skill acquisition and sensory ethnography; second, to apply this approach to the study of bodily skills; third, to show how sensory ethnography affords experiential and multimodal outputs. Along the way, the chapter touches upon some of the intricacies of skateboarding itself.
