New Books in Sociology Michael James Roberts et al., "Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing" (San Diego State UP, 2024)
Mar 5, 2026
Kristin Lawler, a surfing studies scholar and editor; Jarrett Rose, a community health researcher on psychedelics and soul-surfing; and Michael James Roberts, a sociologist of surf and skate cultures. They trace the book's origins, link surfing and skating to temporal politics and anti-work traditions, probe class and labor ties, and explore psychedelics, set and setting, and collective attention practices.
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Rolling for Rights Rally in San Diego
- Skateboarders organized Rolling for Rights in San Diego during Black Lives Matter 2020, mobilizing over a thousand skaters.
- Michael James Roberts describes the rally that rolled down 6th Avenue, showing skaters' visible political intervention in public streets.
Skateboarding Rewrites Urban Space
- Skateboarding produces urban space according to a logic of flow rather than capitalist segregation.
- Kristin Lawler links skateboarders to Lefebvre and the Situationists, showing skaters reshape streets into play, interrupting work/consume spatial divisions.
Surfing Produces Alternative Time
- Surfing restructures time as flow, offering an alternative to capitalist abstract time that prioritizes production.
- Michael James Roberts and Kristin Lawler draw on Lefebvre, Bergson, and Marx to argue surfers enact a lived temporal rhythm tied to oceanic movement.
