The Sociologist Who Studies Skate Culture, and Still Skates at 50+

Most of the comeback stories on this site are about willpower — someone deciding, at 40 or 50, that the sport isn’t finished with them yet. Dr. Indigo Willing’s story has that same shape, but she also happens to be one of the people whose day job is studying, academically, why stories like hers keep happening. That double vantage point — skater and researcher of skaters — makes her worth a closer look.

Who she is

Willing holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Queensland and has spent most of her research career at Griffith University’s Centre for Social and Cultural Research; she is currently a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney. Her academic work looks at who gets to belong in skateboarding — gender equity, consent, and, in one paper this site’s readers will want to know about, ageing — and what actually builds a sense of belonging in a subculture that, for most of its history, wasn’t built with women or older beginners in mind.

That’s not a detached research interest. She stood on a skateboard for the first time at 41, once her PhD was finished and her son had started school, and has kept skating since. In January 2022, writer Aaron Gilbreath interviewed her for Oldster Magazine in a piece titled “Talking with 50-Year-Old Skateboarder Dr. Indigo Willing”. Asked about her 50s, she called them “the most fun decade of my life,” and described her approach to progression in a way that will sound familiar to anyone relearning the sport: every trick or goal is just “something you haven’t got yet.”

Building the community before writing about it

Willing’s community-building work in skateboarding didn’t start with research — it started with organizing. In 2016 she co-founded Girls Skate Brisbane with Evie Ryder and Tora Waldren, later renamed We Skate QLD, which has grown into one of Australia’s largest and longest-running skate networks for women, non-binary and queer skaters and other people who don’t fit the traditional skater mould. In 2019 she and the same group launched Consent Is Rad, a campaign addressing consent and safety culture within skate scenes — a subculture that, like a lot of physically close-contact, informally organized communities, hasn’t always had good norms around this by default.

None of that came out of nowhere. Willing was born in Vietnam in the last years of the war, spent her first months in an orphanage, and was adopted and raised in Australia. In 2000, years before she ever set foot on a skateboard, she founded Adopted Vietnamese International, a network connecting adoptees from that generation that grew from a website and a mailing list into a community of more than a thousand people. That work earned her a Medal of the Order of Australia in 2006 — a medal she returned in 2021, in protest at the honours system awarding its highest rank to Margaret Court, whose public statements Willing described as promoting homophobia and transphobia. By the time she started skating in her 40s, in other words, she’d already spent more than a decade building exactly the kind of community infrastructure — networks for people who don’t automatically have an obvious “in” to a group — that she’d go on to build again inside skateboarding.

What the research actually adds

It would be easy to read Willing’s story as just another “it’s never too late” comeback account, and it is one of those. But her academic lens adds something a purely personal story can’t: a vocabulary for why belonging in a skate scene is so specific, and so fragile.

The paper that matters most for readers of this site is “Skateboarding and the ‘Tired Generation’: Ageing in Youth Cultures and Lifestyle Sports”, which Willing co-wrote with Andy Bennett, Mikko Piispa and Ben Green in the journal Sociology in 2019. It takes as its case study The Tired Video, a skate video made by and for skaters in their 30s and beyond, and asks how people stay involved in a sport that is still framed as a youth culture. The authors find four things that keep older skaters feeling included: modification (adapting tricks and expectations to the body you have now), dedication, humour, and homage — a running, affectionate acknowledgment of the sport’s history. Their conclusion is that thinking about ageing in skateboarding needs to shift away from “imminent departure and deficit” and towards positive adaptation. If you’ve ever quietly scaled a trick down and told yourself that still counts, there is now a peer-reviewed paper on your side.

Willing has since expanded that work into a book, Skateboarding, Power and Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), co-written with the writer Anthony Pappalardo, about the “ethical turn” in skateboarding: the wave of skater-run initiatives around gender, race and inclusion that groups like We Skate QLD are part of. Her argument across both is the same one an adult beginner feels in their gut at an unfamiliar park: who “belongs” isn’t incidental to skate culture, it’s structural, and deliberately organized groups exist to counter it. A welcoming local scene isn’t a nice bonus on top of skating — for a lot of returning adults, it’s the difference between a first session and a habit.

Two things that are both true

What makes Willing’s position genuinely unusual isn’t the age she started, though 41 is a fair answer to anyone wondering if there’s a cutoff. It’s that she’s simultaneously the person inside the culture, doing the unglamorous work of running sessions and building networks, and the person outside it with academic tools to explain why that work matters. Most people doing one of those jobs don’t do the other.

For readers of this site, the takeaway isn’t “go get a sociology PhD before you skate.” It’s smaller and more actionable: the community side of getting back into skating — finding a group, or starting one if none exists near you — isn’t a soft add-on to the sport. It’s load-bearing. If you haven’t found your version of a welcoming local session yet, our guide to finding other adult skaters is a reasonable place to start looking, or to start building one yourself, the way Willing did.