Alternative Media in Alternative Sport: Platforming Working Conditions in Professional Skateboarding
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alternative media enable marginalized people to voice their experiences, challenge dominant ideologies, and circumvent mainstream gatekeepers. Podcasts are an alternative medium that can be counterhegemonic, foregrounding such issues as antiracism, Indigeneity, LGBTQ rights, socialism, and workers’ perspectives. This article expands on alternative-media research by transporting it to the skateboarding subculture. I first depict the skateboard outlets Thrasher Magazine (1981) and The Berrics (2007) website as hegemonic and mainstream. By contrast, I depict podcasts The Bunt (2016) and Vent City (2019) as counterhegemonic and alternative. I then ask: To what degree do skate podcasts acknowledge professional skateboarders as workers? And: Do such shows allow skaters to express grievances with their industry? A discourse analysis of Thrasher and The Berrics demonstrates that they often mystify freelance work, class, and skaters’ working conditions. An analysis of The Bunt and Vent City suggests that podcasts offer unique and radical perspectives, though attention to working conditions is uneven. I find there may be too much overlap between the case studies for an alternative/mainstream distinction to be meaningful. Political currents within skateboarding are still promising, however, and digital media will be essential in making the subculture and industry more inclusive.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it