Skating against settler colonialism: Bethany Geckle, ‘Symbolic Sovereignty and the Decolonizing and Indigenizing Potentials of Skateboarding, Emerging Media, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Skating against settler colonialism: Bethany Geckle, ‘Symbolic Sovereignty and the Decolonizing and Indigenizing Potentials of Skateboarding, Emerging Media, 2025

13Jan25

Abstract: Skateboarding is a practice that reimagines and repurposes the urban landscape by manipulating its designs for unintended purposes and creating new relationships with space. In this way, skateboarding may challenge the exclusionary urban logics in colonized cities. Extending this line of thought, I explore the decolonizing and indigenizing potential of skateboarding through the concepts of visual sovereignty and placemaking. I suggest skateboarding diversifies and contemporizes indigenous arts and practices, translates indigeneity into urban contexts that traditionally preclude indigenous peoples and cultures, builds communities between indigenous groups and across rural and urban geographies, and imagines other ways of being, doing, and relating to space that signals more indigenous futures.

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