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. Surely, such interests can't possibly be unrelated.

"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 

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 currently working on a monograph continuing some of the theories laid out in this work. For anyone interested in discussing some historical materialism of useless wooden toys (or trying to skate!), just send me an email.

"The ‘dialogical person’ is critical and knows that 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