I was rolling along the cracked sidewalks to a writing session at my local coffee spot. I suddenly felt the smooth sensation of tarmac. Looking over my shoulder, I noticed the entire parking lot was resurfaced. I rolled around for a quick gander. Lo and behold, three ledges and a curb sat atop a slight bank, untouched, sending a quiver of excitement across my body. I celebrated this new life, this new skate spot, by sending a few attempted slides and grinds, along with a few falls.

After hours of writing, of scribbling down notes of no actual importance, I went back to the parking lot. This time, I was equipped with a rub brick, wax, and some Salba sauce to tune up the ledges for a smoother grind. I landed front and back noseslides first try, even poking the front nose as per my style. I threw a crooked grind up there and after about twenty tries I rolled away feeling a bit like Femke Bol holding an Olympic medal. That was a real one!

Skateboarding ≈ writing

Research is all about locking in on a fleeting idea, and recognising its potential to bloom and buzz. This is the craft of life. It is not mere happenstance as it orbits a researcher’s skill. But it’s not planned either. The real joy of ethnographic writing is its surprise discoveries. It’s a feel, a strange familiarity, a sparkling glitter in the mind whose vibratory wavelength is just right at the gamma.

In some ways, writing up research is akin to the sensation of skateboarding. It’s about getting into a state of flow to merge improvisation and creativity with structure and rigour. It can be scary and frustrating, lonely and monotonous – against all (political) odds. As a researcher or skater, you will come up short. You will fall. You will fail. But once you get a thing locked in, whether it’s an argument or a trick, something of purpose and relevance announces itself. This thing will be circled up and become a pivot point in your skater’s/researcher’s life.

Prefigurative warm-ups

Over the past year, we – Brian and Sander – have collaborated on various writing projects on skate culture. Most recently, we published Skateboarding and the Senses, a sensory anthropology of the feels, sights, and sounds of what it is like to move sideways on a wooden plank and four wheels, a rolling ethnography. Throughout the writing process, we noticed that we approached our writing as if it were a skate session. Similar to how aging skaters reduce muscle stiffness by warm-ups, our writing process began by loosening up our research fibers – sharing snippets of thoughts, texting the latest and greatest skate videos, scribbling vignettes, jumping on short video calls.

The point of these warm-ups was prefigurative, never to design a structure for a book-length project. Instead, these warm-ups helped us orient our research bodies towards one another, trying to figure out a writing style that merged our sensibilities and interests. Our co-authorship was hardly discussed, a bond of trust and respect allowed its organic practice. Exchanging erratic thoughts and drafts helped us move beyond a researcher’s desire for perfectionism, for showing off, for performing an academic persona. We were checking out the spot.

By approaching writing like a playful skate session, research can shift its focus back to curiosity and care, a return to ludere causa ludendi, to “play for play’s sake.” A research topic, then, becomes a bit like a skateable obstacle: something to return to over and over again, applying different methods and strategies to disclose its generative potential. In skating, you have to roll around an obstacle, feel it, fall around it trying to ride it. It’s going to buck you off if it’s a real one, a raw buzzing should surprise you in a way that’s magnetising. A skateable obstacle – like a research topic – can be a magical (and prickly) bind.

Skate writing as a tactic

There was something else we noticed. When submitting research articles, peer reviewers do their utmost best to help you improve your line of argumentation. But hardly ever will a peer reviewer express their genuine excitement about your writing. Often, it’s not even their choice – the peer review etiquettes are formalised in such a way that any emotive response is discouraged. As a result, the societal or personal importance of a research project becomes – at one point or another – curtailed, “skate stopped.” The very spaces of play that afforded skateboarding become almost unrideable, as much as a second draft of a paper quickly becomes a bureaucratic negotiation with an unknown figure in the digital ether.

Under the name of criticality, play shifts to serious business, bracketing emotive passion and personal motivation. Sharing our writing with skate researchers felt different. Feedback included double exclamation marks, aphoristic statements of excitement, and brutal comments whenever our writing was off. But what resounded most were our peers cheering us on, helping us to land our ideas.

Academia has systems to control the production of knowledge to safeguard and secure its claims. But these systems need not control our playful criticality – we need not shift to mere idea management based on external fears. Perhaps, writing ethnographic texts as if they were a skate session with friends may be a tactic that resists such logics of restraint – carving out space for play amongst academic rigour.

Some sections of this blog are derived from or inspired by the following text:

Hölsgens, S., & Glenney, B. (2025). Skateboarding and the Senses: Skills, Surfaces, and Spaces. London: Routledge.