SSHRED Seminar #2 hosted by Dr Indigo Willing with Dr Benjamin Duester

Green Pressure: Symbolic Environmentalism and the Dilemma of Sustainable Skating

This talk argues that recent environmental sustainability matters expressed in skateboarding’s culture and economy represent a reciprocal and often fragile power relation between producers and consumers’ expectations for continuously improving sustainability standards. Based on a post-greenwashing analysis of corporate environmentalism, this talk will categorise these expectations under the umbrella of ‘green pressure’. The primary concern of green pressure is to demonstrate the necessity for a conscious dealing with the symbolic characteristics of environmental practices in both skateboarding’s DIY and corporate production circuits.

Benjamin Duester is a Postdoc Research Fellow at Georg-August University Göttingen, Germany. He works in the ERC-funded project Sound Knowledge: Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World. His research explores materiality, DIY cultures and political ecology. He was awarded his PhD from Griffith University in 2021 on the topic of the cassette tape’s economic and cultural relevance for music in the digital age. The project included extensive fieldwork across Australia, Japan and the United States for which Ben interviewed more than 85 experts across independent music scenes and the music industry in English, Japanese and German. For SSHRED, Ben is particularly interested in researching the environmental impact of Skateboarding and strategies for appropriating Skateboarding’s waste in creative and sustainable ways. Ben has published several peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Journal of Consumer Culture, DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society and Media, Culture & Society. He is currently working on his first monograph titled ‘Cassette Tape: The Hybrid Format in the Digital Age’ for Bloomsbury.