I'm a skater. And a scholar. For years those things haven't overlapped much. And yet, somehow in 2024 I met a couple of cool skatenerds who wanted to write a fun paper together:

Skateboarding and the Surplus Value of City Play 

I'm also constantly working on this larger monograph on the structure of skate culture, and enjoy attending academic skate conferences when I can.

STCS Draft  

"...although it is within the power of humans to create and transform, in a concrete situation of alienation individuals may be impaired in the use of that power. Far from destroying their faith in the people, however, this possibility strikes them as a challenge to which they must respond. They are convinced that the power to create and transform, even when thwarted in concrete situations, tends to be reborn." -Paulo Freire

My parents (and sister) are visual artists, and my wife is a sign painter. So I have been gifted with a wonderful lifelong relationship with cartoons, stories from line drawings: comics, animations, video games, cave paintings, folklore, skateboard graphics, tattoos, and Edgeworth Boxes alike.

"Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there's just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would be otherwise invisible." - David Graeber

social theory in cartoons

cartoons in social theory