Sam Buchan-Watts

I am a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow (2021-2024) in the Fine Art Department, working on a multi-form, creative-critical project about skateboarding as a queer cultural practice.

My background is in poetry, with a PhD on late modernist lyric that began life as a critical PhD but necessitated a more flexible structure as I began exploring the thesis in practical terms (it was the first creative-critical English PhD to be awarded at York). Poetry continues to underpin much of my research, and a desire to inhabit thinking at the level of form.

I am working on a creative non-fiction project that offers a reparative reading of the visual culture of skateboarding as a richly ambivalent and repressed site of homosocial intimacy and queer expression. I posit skateboarding as an acutely self-reflexive, modernist cultural practice, centred on the documentation and mediation by its practitioners of the articulation of (often) male-identified bodies through urban space.