SSHRED Seminar #5 - Paul O'Connor on Conceptualising Grey Spaces in Skateboarding

Hosted by Tom Critchley

Building on our paper in Leisure Studies (O’Connor, Evers, Glenney, Willing 2022), Greyness was used as a rhetorical tool to frame the material and symbolic spaces that skateboarders occupy. In this talk I will be building on this frame and conceptualising Grey Spaces to reflect on skateboarding and the environment in more depth. Again the contrast extends from the chromatic turn in both leisure and wellbeing literature, and the focus is pulled to skateboarding practice. In this talk greyness will be explored in the realms of therapeutic environments, ageing, and mental health.

Paul O’Connor is Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Exeter, UK. He was awarded his PhD in Sociology from the University of Queensland in 2009 on the topic of Muslim Youth and Everyday Hybridity in Hong Kong. He has taught Anthropology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Sociology at Lingnan University, and Religious Studies at Charles University, Prague. He is chiefly a sociologist of religion but explores area studies, ethnicity, and lifestyle sports. He has written extensively on Hong Kong society performing research with the Muslim community and working on issues of ethnicity. His first book ‘Islam in Hong Kong’ 2012 explored the lives of Muslims in Hong Kong. He holds strong interests in pilgrimage exploring both the Hajj and secular sacred spaces. He is active in the scholarship on the sociology of skateboarding and his work has expanded from the enquiry of middle-aged skateboarders, to include issues of space, social theory, race, gender, environmentalism, religion and spirituality. The notion that skateboarding could be considered a lifestyle religion was explored in Paul’s second monograph ‘Skateboarding and Religion’ 2020.