Marquis Palmer
Hamilton College
Project
The Inner-World of Skateboarding Communities
Germany, Argentina, Spain, Japan
As a Watson fellow, I will join some of the largest skateboarding communities in the world to explore the defining cultural values and practices of these communities and the extent to which they deviate from the dominant cultures of their societies and thereby truly exist as distinctive communities. By the end of my Watson year, I hope to deepen my understanding of this relatively unexplored aspect of skateboarding – the communal aspect – while learning how small, relatively marginal communities sustain a way of life that is distinct from the societies in which they exist.