To talk about Dr Indigo Willing’s life is to talk about her work; the enthusiastic tone of voice in her research reverberates her emphatic skating. Though trained as a sociologist, Indi’s studies into skateboarding are as activist and empowering as they are observant. Along with Evie Ryder and Tora Waldren, she co-founded Girl Skate Brisbane, a collective ‘proudly celebrating, connecting, documenting and developing the girls and women’s skateboarding scene in Brisbane and South East Queensland’. I sat down with Indi to talk about what skateboarders can learn from scholars, and how academia can benefit from skateboarding.
Interview by Sander Hölsgens
It seems to me that most skateboard scholars either started skating as a teenager or never touched a board in their life. Your story is rather different. How did you get into skateboarding?
Haha yes. I started skateboarding at 41. I am now 47 and it’s still like my oxygen. I need to do it regularly or I feel less alive. Any skater knows that feeling. You feel attracted to skateboarding like metal to a magnet.
Sometimes I feel like the oldest person in the world at the skatepark. But then I saw all the older skaters having a laugh, good times and rolling on the Internet. And I don’t mean just ones who still rip at pro level like Daewon Song. I mean ordinary dudes with depleting agility and rounder shaped bodies who ache after hitting a 3 stairs set, not 13 stairs set. You can get a lot of joy seeing both. Social media has had a beautifully democratic effect on skateboarding that way.
I grew up near a rusty, crusty skatepark, always filled with dudes. No girls really, that I saw. My bus to school, university and work would go past it every day. I’d look on with envy, how much fun and freedom guys were having. But it was really a matter of confidence just rocking up, and I had none.
Racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, sexism, colonialism are all issues in skateboarding and elsewhere. But skateboarding can challenge those things too.
I’ve always wanted to skateboard. But it was also a hard time growing up in 1970s Australia. You need courage to skate and I had that, but it was being used up elsewhere in my teen years. As a war orphan from the Vietnam War, as a refugee and adoptee being the only Asian raised in an all white family, it was hard feeling at home in the world. And even now. Plus back then, there was pretty heavy racism in my town – towards Aborginal people, Italians, Greeks, Asians…anyone not fitting the blonde haired and blue eyed surfer type really. Moral panics over Vietnamese gangs and ‘boat people’ didn’t help either. You got yelled at, people spat at you and threatened you with all kinds of nonsense. Trying to survive kept me busy. I would have loved to have channelled my energy through skating – like the boys you see in Mid90s and Minding the Gap and all, but I just followed a different path first.
My escape as a youth was through reading and writing. It’s not like I didn’t have fun, good times and good friends too. But I was also preoccupied with wanting to give back and honour all the opportunities I had as a refugee. It was only after years of community work, studying adoption of children from conflict zones, becoming a mother and waiting until my own son started school that I finally knew, “OK, now is your time to skate”. It’s like a light went on, with choir music and all like a big epiphany moment in a movie, haha. Now is the time to start skateboarding! What a fucking great gift too. Concurrently, there were groups like Girls Skate Network and Girls Skate Australian on the Internet, so you could see and be inspired by girls and women who skated, and ripped. And I met a really supportive skater, my homie Evie, who with Tora now co-runs Girls Skate Brisbane (GSB) with me.
Why did you decide to research skateboarding?
Skateboarding, activism and academia can feel like extensions of one’s soul, heart and mind. Or expressions of them? So bringing them together gives me a sense of unity. What’s great is that there’s all kinds of individuals across the globe who are also bringing these passions together. This is what makes events like Pushing Boarders so fundamentally constructive, fresh and hopefully, contagious! More skaters, more activists, more academics…let’s get this show on the road and make the world a more OK place to be in, you know?! Cause a lot of the world sucks right now.
There are academics in all fields who want to be some kind of ‘expert’ but never doing shit for the actual people they study. But I find with those who study skateboarding, there’s some commitment to social change. Not that you need a degree to do that. But if you do have one, then you’re capable of being an additional part of a genuine revolution right now. Racism, homophobia, transphobia, ageism, sexism, colonialism are all issues in skateboarding and elsewhere. But skateboarding can challenge those things too. There’s a benefit in having a deeper theoretical and empirical understanding of skateboarding. And through rigorous but also participatory, inclusive research. That’s the gig I am keen to be part of anyway.
I also remember journalist Barbara Odanaka (a former editor for The Skateboarders Journal) saying something like she’s never met a skateboarder who doesn’t have a remarkable life story to tell. I think researchers feel the same way. The scene itself has so many intriguing individuals, and brings a distinct social and cultural richness to any city, town or village. Makes sense that it attracts attention from sociologists, anthropologists psychologists, journalists, historians, urban planners and so on. I do research on a range of topics, but skateboarding never fails to fascinate me.
So what exactly can you research as a skateboard scholar? What does it look, feel, sound and smell like? What are the kinds of things you published or made?
The first research I did on skateboarding was with Scott Shearer, a former pro skater and urban researcher. We studied a petition, meetings and film that our local skate community put together to push for an upgrade the city’s only skatepark (Paddington or ‘Paddo’ in Brisbane). Paddo was crusty and old but much loved and all the locals, plus Australian legends like Dennis Durrant, Alex Lawton and Tommy Fynn, as well as a big diverse group of other skaters, were all supportive. My friend Kane Stewart made the documentary.
Another key insight was that it’s not just young skaters who push for change. The petition showed all kinds of demographics feel a part of and want to support skateboarding, including in ages (up to 50+), genders, and relationships to skating (partners, shop owners, grandparents, fans). The Council eventually put in the dollars! Ironically, nearly everyone involved all miss the old park now, including me. But on the plus side, there’s a whole new generation of teenagers, and fresh faces like girls groups and queer skaters making that space their own home and giving it fresh life. And the city is building new skateparks all the time now. It’s a great indication of skateboarders changing the city and its outlooks towards skateboarding.
The next thing that caught my attention as a researcher is how many older skaters were about. This led me to look at the Tired Video made by Tired Skateboards., which Thrasher posted with a great deal of affection. It exclusively features skaters who are in their mid-30s to 50s. I teamed up with Finnish scholar Mikko Piispa who studies the life course of athletes in lifestyle sports, Prof. Andy Bennett who has written about ageing punks and club ravers, and Dr Ben Green who looks at ‘peak moments’ individuals feel in youth scenes that shape their devotion and identities to them. What’s not to love in seeing an old dude in his original Black Flag tee grinding coping in a bowl, or an ageing street skater in his snap-back hat covering his greying and balding head doing a wallie or pole jam down in his local car park? But there’s a pre-loaded visual and stylistic script for skaters to instantly relate to these men. For anyone outside that, there can be knee-jerk negativity. That is, some skaters feel compelled to comment negatively about skaters who don’t display obvious signs of ‘core’ skating – and this often includes women, non-binary, Trans, Queer and older skaters.
I also wanted to explore what we can learn from famous ageing skaters. Working with Ben again and joined by Dr Adele Pavlidis who did her PhD on gender in action sports, we did a content analysis of The Bones Brigade (BB) documentary. Pretty much the minute we saw it we became fascinated by the portrayal of rivalry between ‘bad boys’ (Christina Hosoi and Tony Alva’s crew) and the BB who they called ‘boy scouts’ (Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Lance Mountain, Mike McGill, Steve Caballero and Tommy Guerrero). Here in these groups had these overlapping and competing types of masculinity. This was reflected in clothes (e.g. black leather and denim versus bright neon outfits), trick styles (e.g. Hosoi versus Hawk), tour habits (e.g. hard partying versus no drinking and early nights), and approaches to risk (e.g. minimal or no safety gear versus the BB wearing helmets and pads).
Yet, despite their differences, a certain ethos in skateboarding unites them. Both groups connected through appreciating the risks they all took and dedication to advancing skateboarding to unprecedented levels of skill. But there was also a powerful affective, emotional dimension uniting them all too. Both groups conveyed that skateboarding was best when it was simply about fun and individual achievement rather than all clout and competitions. For instance, Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen were aggressively competitive, but found the pressure ‘to always win’ was also brutal on their mental health. And, these rival skaters shared and respected the outlook that skateboarding was a central part of their identity and activity that can give a lifelong sense of belonging (be it Alva’s ‘bad boys’ or the BBs ‘boy scouts’). This ethos in the pioneering, mega-famous skateboarders is also reflected in studies of lesser known professional and ordinary skaters too, such as in Mikko’s study on former pro skateboarders in Finland and Paul O’ Connor’s study of middle-aged skaters.
What is left out of these studies are the experiences and perspectives of skaters from say, various genders, different ethnic backgrounds, indigenous skaters, and skaters whose families arrived as migrants. So I’m next focusing on the history of Asian American skateboarders, from the Japanese-American pride of Christan Hosoi (all those rising suns lol) to Jerry Hsu and Daewon Song, to contemporary figures like documentary maker and skater Bing Lui who bring something different yet valuable again to the scene.
How has skateboarding and its ethos affected your scholarship? What can sociology teach us about skateboarding? Or, more generally, what can skateboarders learn from scholars? And what can scholars learn from skateboarding?
One of the recent things that’s deeply interesting is this emerging ‘new ethics’ of skateboarding. It’s been something you and I have briefly talked about working on. And Max Harrison-Caldwell nails it in his Skateism article in May 2019 ‘Let’s Put This Shit to Bed’. Max unpacks the question: what does the idea of ‘core’ mean and what its function is when coupled with skaters, shops, crews, magazines, someone’s trick repertoire and so on? It’s seriously a tough love letter to skateboarding, with one of the take-away lessons being about ‘gate-keeping’ in the skate scene.
Every scene has past traditions and there’s room to respect that. If something is revered, it is often because people have consciously invested meaning in it to be so. As a sociologist especially, it’s more important to understand why people do things rather to rush to judge because we feel something’s not quite right or totally gross. Questions of ‘authenticity’ in skateboarding can value important traditions. But they can also point to the ways skaters negatively invest in ‘gatekeeping’.
Does the way we skate and see skateboarding empower ourselves and others? Or does it just involve some kind of power trip and power relationship that should be the antithesis of what we’re about?
All social groups can form culturally distinct habits and forms of social, cultural and symbolic capital (if we borrow from sociologist Pierre Bourdieu) or sets of norms that can include or exclude. Traditionally in say, Western countries, there are definitely codes and normative ways of talking, places to go, trick repertoires, things to wear, ways to move, certain ethos and outlooks and various forms of embodiment that are commonly adopted and sometimes revered in skateboarding. A tell-tale hole in the side of their sneaker. A board that is scuffed. Trucks worn down in certain spots even tell a story about what the skater likes to do and how often. The sight of a giant stair set numerous pro skaters have been humbled by (e.g. Wallenberg) simply seen on a video on a phone and shared with another with the expectation they’ll know the significance. Skateboarding can involve things that most of the general population will never care for, yet those who do, care for those things, we care very deeply.
It might be useful for us to ask: Does the way we skate and see skateboarding empower ourselves and others? Or does it just involve some kind of power trip and power relationship that should be the antithesis of what we’re about? Do the skaters we give props to and time for represent much diversity or do we always stick with friends who all might look, dress and act the same, have the same demographics and so on? Do the things we want, pursue or admire for ourselves in skating obscure or even act as a basis to look down on anything different from that? Do we welcome someone of a different level, age, outlook and background? How warmly and enthusiastically do we greet newcomers, and with the view they are going to bring something new and fresh, maybe in a philosophical, mental or emotional way rather than just a physical or skills sense? These are questions some/all of us probably don’t think over and do enough.
Scholars can also learn so much from how those driving the ‘new ethics of skateboarding’ negotiates this – be they millennials concerned about equality, generation x questioning exclusionary practices in the past, women, trans skaters, non-binary skaters, people of colour, queer communities and so on. There are important insights sociologists can gain from watching a scene that goes from ridiculing or excluding others who lack the normative signs one is an ‘insider’ to reconfiguring the boundaries to something more porous, malleable and values-based rather than aesthetically, physically and materially based alone. That’s where it’d be interesting to talk to skaters from all kinds of backgrounds, and locations – Alabama to Afghanistan – to ask them to self-reflect on the question: am I fostering a culture in skateboarding that’s empowering, or am I/we/they power-tripping by gatekeeping it?
Not unlike the skate industry, scholars seem to especially focus on skateboarding in Western Europe and Northern America. What’s more, the mythologised origin story of skateboarding is one of young white surfer dudes, despite the rich history of 1960s skating in Japan, among other places. Your work on ageing skateboarders and pioneering skaters with Asian heritage gestures towards the breadth of skate experiences and histories.
In terms of the difference non-Western outlooks bring to skateboarding, I can’t do that justice, as I’m Vietnamese but was raised in Australia. I can only think about skateboarding as part of a diaspora, as a refugee and so on but someone entirely raised in the West. However, I have skated places like Singapore and Japan and they seem like really refreshing scenes and particularly as a woman or ‘girl skater’. Research on what’s going on elsewhere in Asia, like in your observational ethnography in South Korea, also helps balance out how we understand skaters experiences globally.
We all want to make a difference in this world. Skateboarding opens the gate to do both.
We all play a part in mapping the history and evolutions in skateboarding. As individuals or collectives, what we cannot help but bring to skateboarding are our various social, historical and cultural lenses, mosaics of differing experiences, and rich range of ways to construct and carry out our identities. If we take music as a metaphor, there is a lot of re-mixing and inventiveness being fostered by groups like The Skate Witches run by Shari White and Kristen Ebeling, and the humour but also cleverly delivered skating by Australia’s Ritchie Jackson.
Furthermore, in those Western cultures where skating has existed for decades (American, the U.K., Australian and Canada for instance) there is a dismantling of more negative traditions as well. An exemplar is the queer DIY. approach to skateboarding like we see in Unity Skateboards, Pave the Way or in the XEM Skaters zines, all are unreliant on anyone else’s interpretations of skateboarding. Then, with the global skateboarding scene from places like Afghanistan to South Africa to Cambodia and beyond, we get to again learn so much from fresh interpretations of skateboarding.
Your work as a sociologist contributes to a deconstruction of Skateboarding-capital-s. It seems to be an activist stance. As you posted in a tweet: “World often kinda sux. Got work to do changing it!” Do you feel any ethical responsibility as a skateboarder and your volunteer role co-running Girls Skate Brisbane as well?
Probably the biggest ethical responsibility from any roles I might be fortunate enough to do on any given day as an introverted misfit who happens to also be an activist, academic and community volunteer is to keep opening the gate and to also break glass ceilings. 
My greatest mentors and inspirations are individuals who always want to pay things forward, and are wary of being self-serving by doing regular work in the service of others. My adoptive grandmother, who was an anti Vietnam War activist and women’s rights activist in the 1960s and 70s and co-founder of the Vietnamese orphanage I am from, also shared with me the motto – community before cliques, and principles before personalities. A crowd is not the same thing as a community. Who or what is popular is not always principled. This kind of ethos applies to skateboarding as much as anywhere else. Another saying that guides me is ‘you can’t be what you can’t see’ which I’ve heard Kim Woozy, the founder of Mahfia and a pivotal member of Skate Like a Girl say in the past.
With Girls Skate Brisbane, one of the ways this ethos carries over into what we do there is that we ensure there is decent representation of all skateboarders, not just ones destined for the lime-light. So we post clips of girls who are stoked with their first ollie, or first drop in alongside girls who are pushing the scenes skating to the most advanced level. We post clips of cis women and trans and non-binary skaters. We feature mums and older skaters. We have posted photos girls and women shredding WCMX. This is also reflected in our admin team, with Tora in her 20s, Evie in her 30s and me in my 40s and combined, with us reflecting all kinds of sexualities, genders, ethnicities, skills, skate styles and life-experiences. Why? Because that’s our authentic window into skateboarding and its rarely shown in the big skate magazines, sponsors’ social media, in video highlights of comps and events and in high-budget videos. Because that’s the kind of screen content that gives new skaters an opportunity to be what they can see from their earliest days skating over to as far as they can and want to take it. Our Girls Skate Brisbane events and socials also encourage connections across our different biographies.
We don’t always get things right, it can be a bit ‘trial and error’ and we’re all running a non-funded, grassroots network for skaters while we try to hold down jobs, pay bills, follow dreams, and look after our friends and other loved ones. But we’ve had a lot of fun. And we all want to make a difference in this world. Skateboarding opens the gate to do both.
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Follow Indigo on Twitter: @indigowilling.
