Shreddin’ It Up: Rethinking “Adolescence” by Examining the Social Arrangements at a Skateboard Park

• In Event: Roundtable Session 111
  In Roundtable Session: Rethinking Adolescents at Risk

Abstract

This presentation discusses the findings of an ethnographic study that explores how the social arrangements at a skateboard park facilitate learning and literate practices for a group of “at-risk” young men—practices that proffer ideas of adolescence that contrast with normalized ideas of this stage of life. Specifically, it demonstrates a) how age-heterogeneity produces learning practices in which participants move fluidly across a range of subject-positions; b) how the expectation that all participants be “producers” establishes an exigency for literate activities whereby participants have the potential to transform the culture at the park; and c) how the political nature of skateboarding facilitates participants’ development of political reasoning, cultural analysis, and social activism that extend beyond the park.

Author

• Robert Petrone, Montana State University