Nairobi on Board: Skateboarders' Sensory Experiences of Community, Body, and Space

Abstract: In this paper, I argue skateboarding to be a ritualizing performance that acts as a catalyst for transformative energies and heightened emotional states. Aided by the sensory experience of riding a board, powerful feelings of connectedness and unity arise amongst those who practice skateboarding, so intense that they transgress day-to-day social boundaries and temporarily overcome the socioeconomic segregation of ordinary urban life. Skateboarding is often conceptualized as an identical global phenomenon, bypassing its localized nature and culturally specific character. When it comes to skateboarding practices in the Global South, little has been written beyond the perspectives of development and peacebuilding, fortifying narratives of skateboarding as simply a Western export. Thus, this paper aims to contribute to expanding the literature on skateboarding beyond the Global North and deepen the understanding of diversity in skateboarding practices. Using sensory ethnography and leaning on the fields of ritual- and performance studies, I explore the life worlds of skateboarders in Nairobi, Kenya, trying to understand their experiences of community and the interaction between the skateboarding body and space. Through the act of skateboarding, my participants reinvent themselves and the world they want to belong to, simultaneously drawing on a global cultural legacy and performing a context-specific identity and localized practice.