Dogtown and X-Games. Bodies, spaces, and signs — an effective history of skateboarding

• Applicant: Eckehart Velten Schäfer
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2019 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 427495674

The thesis attempts to write a concise, accessible cultural history of a social and cultural practice that provides a great deal of insight into the changes and shifts that have occurred in the field of sports since around 1.970.This is a useful addition to the existing (recently rapidly growing) literature on the subject, as these works, mostly based an field research and Interviews, only arrive at snapshots of a sporting practice that can now Look back an six decades of history. The reconstruction of a historical framework made it clean that the "presentist" literature, in its very nature, tends to over-estimate quite specific points within this history, thus creating a distorted Image. The work shows that the practice changes fundamentally three times between the appearance of the first boards in the later 1 950s and skateboatding`s inclusion in the schedule of the Summer Olympics in 2016 - both with regard to the movements typically carried out and the terrains used, as well as the interpretations and attributions that reflect and influence this action.After 1970, the children's play of 1960 became an initially quite conventional sport. It was not until the late 1970s that skateboarding was transformed into the subculture commonly associated with the practice. The "sportification" to which this subculture has been subjected since about 1 985 his not yet led to the rapprochement to the parameters of organized sports in which the present “olympfication” of skateboarding has its roots. Rather, the development was broken a round 1990 by a further transformation of physical-spatial performances and the representation of the practice, which initially led to a second "subculturalisation" This oscillating movement between pop and sports culture, which can be shown by skateboarding as a representative of the family of so-called trend or action sports that emerged in the course of the 1980s, is reconstructed by means of a set of instruments that draws an recent methodological and theoretical developments in qualitative (cultural) sociology. In its approach, the thesis combines sociological concepts of the body and of space with recent concepts of a "practice turn"; for example, by systematically focusing an interactions between the development of skateboard body techniques and video technology, aspects of the materiality of social change are focused.Although the work did not aim at theoretical and methodological considerations, but concentrated on the representation of its object, there were also - collateral - some conclusions concerning those theoretical and methodological discussions.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants