ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the skateboard community in Graz, Austria, where a ban on skateboard tricks has been in effect since April 2021. Since then, skateboarding has been allowed but jumps and tricks have been banned to ensure public safety. This led to a significant number of protests in both digital and public spaces, and for a brief period it could be argued that the formation of an urban social movement was underway. The chapter focuses on the role of media in facilitating the political participation of young skateboarders in the context of their protests in 2021 and 2022. It will show how the protests were characterised by hybrid settings in two different ways. First, the protests took place in a hybrid media environment where traditional and new media logics were combined. Second, in many cases, physical and digital spaces were used together to draw attention to the young skateboarders’ concerns, which is referred to as hybrid activism.
