Via Community News Service, a University of Vermont journalism internship
SOUTH BURLINGTON – When Norwich philosophy professor Brian Glenney is not lecturing his students, he acts as a leading voice in skateboard research. The tre-flipping scholar explores the dogma of the deck, publishing academic journals and hosting seminars blending skateboarding and philosophical principles.
Now, his latest project – “The Grey Work of Lifestyle Entrepreneurialism in Skateboarding” – examines how skateboarding is more than meets the eye.
“I’m into skateboarding scholarship because it seems very mysterious,” Glenney said. “The more I write about it and think about it and read about it, the more mysterious it becomes.”
Glenney, 51, is originally from the outskirts of Seattle. He grew up going to Nirvana basement shows and first encountered skateboarding as an insecure high school student, inspired by his classmate. Glenney started to skate and go to punk shows around the city and it stuck with him.
Glenney attended the University of Washington in 1997. Not knowing what to major in, he took a philosophy course by chance. It instantly clicked, and Glenney was arguing about the existence of God within the first week, he said.
He graduated in 1999 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and journeyed to Scotland in pursuit of his masters at St. Andrews University.
Glenney arrived there the following year hoping to show off his philosophy skills, but the strict UK grading system humbled him and made him realize how much further he had to go.
“A lot of people ask ‘So should I just give up because I was not as good as I thought I was?’” Glenney said. “I was at that point in my life, I had nowhere else to go, I have to full send philosophy.”
Glenney received his masters in philosophy after a year and returned to the states to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Southern California in 2007.
Glenney taught at Gordon College in Massachusetts for nine years until he moved to Vermont and became a professor at Norwich University in 2016. At Norwich, he teaches classes on ethics and the history of philosophy.
“In his classes, he really just brings this vibe of sharing your opinion and we’ll talk about it and it’s never personal,” Norwich student Hector Aponte said. “He’s helped me discover what my beliefs and values are. We have agreed and disagreed, but I have never felt an ounce of judgment.”
Through teaching, Glenney began to find overlap between his scholastics and his childhood passion. He decided to combine the two in 2018 to trailblaze a new subject: the philosophy of skateboarding.
“If we think about the first philosophers like Socrates, who would just rove around a city and ask people questions, it seems like skateboarders are doing the same thing,” Glenney said. “But instead of questions, they frustrate people with their sound, maybe their attitude.”
Glenney started by finding connections between skateboarding and his previous work on the Molyneux problem, which asks whether or not spatial awareness is learned or innate.
Glenney said skateboarding posed some answers to that problem.
“My previous work is on theories of sensory perception and whether or not we can actually experience the world as it is,” Glenney said. “When you get into skateboarding, it is a very visual and tactile activity. But you never think about it that way, because it’s so active.”
Glenney took his skateboard philosophy to the next level when he and Steve Mull published Glenney’s first journal on skateboarding, “Skateboarding and the Ecology of Urban Space.”
In it, he explains that skateboarding is an “ecological activity,” emerging through interaction between skaters and urban spaces, Glenney said.
As Glenney’s studies grew, so too did the field of skateboarding scholastics.
He paired up with fellow skateboarding scholar Paul O’Connor in 2020 for a conference in London. After the pair skated and debated through London’s alleyways, they brainstormed and then published the article “Skateparks as Hybrid Elements of the City.”
In 2023, the duo joined other skateboard researchers to found SSHRED, or the Skating Sustainability Health Research and Environmental Design.
The team invites aspiring skateboard researchers to learn about the role skateboarding plays in the environment through seminars, blog posts and academic papers.
“Being a skateboarder is like being a skateboard researcher,” O’Connor said. “It has the same kind of connections, collaborations and inclusion.”
In August, Glenney will release a book with co-author Gabriele Ferretti titled “Molyneux’s Question in Action with Springer,” his latest foray into the topic.
Until then, Glenney continues to skate across the Green Mountains with his camera — documenting fellow skaters’ self-expression through philosophy and noseslides alike.
“Skateboarding is really about doing it for yourself, and philosophy is thinking for yourself,” Glenney said.