New Books Network Michael James Roberts et al., "Roll and Flow: The Cultural Politics of Skateboarding and Surfing" (San Diego State UP, 2024)
Mar 5, 2026
Michael James Roberts, sociology professor and co-editor, offers historical and theoretical takes. Kristin Lawler, surfing studies scholar and co-editor, connects skate and surf to space, labor, and direct action. Jarrett Rose, community health researcher, explores psychedelics and soul-surfing. They discuss skateboarding as spatial intervention, surfers’ anti-work roots, psychedelics’ role in surf culture, and attention, flow, and collective practice.
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Board Cultures Became Political Actors In 2020
- Skateboarders and surfers acted as visible political actors in summer 2020, forcing a rethink of board cultures as political rather than apolitical.
- Rolling for Rights in San Diego (1000+ skaters) and paddle-outs reframed skating and surfing as public interventions into racial justice protests.
Skateboarding Produces Space As Flow
- Skateboarding reshapes urban space by privileging flow, play, and pleasure over capitalist segregation of functions.
- Theoretical lineage includes Lefebvre, situationists, and flanantes filmmakers who frame skateboarding as psychogeographic dérive and cultural sabotage.
Surfing Creates Alternative Temporalities
- Surfing reorganizes time by offering alternative temporalities that resist capitalist clock time, drawing on Marxist critiques of produced time and space.
- Speakers link Bergson's durée and Lefebvre's production of space to show surfing's ontological challenge to industrial rhythms.
