Meet the people involved

Seeing the city and public space differently through skateboarding and other urban and creative sports.

Who’s involved – Current

Project Leader: Dr Indigo Willing

Dr Indigo Willing - 'Skate, Create, Educate and Re-generate' (SkateCER) Lab Leader 2024 - current

Indigo has a PhD in sociology from The University of QLD and is a Social Science Visiting Fellow at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), University of Sydney. Her work and activities span social worlds that reflect her diverse background and lived experiences as a Vietnam War orphan and adoptee, an Asian Australian, academic, and skateboarder involved with award-winning and internationally-recognised community projects. 

Indigo is co-chair for the IAB for Skateistan who make skating and education accessible by partnering with local skate groups from around the globe. She is also the co-author of Skateboarding, Power and Change (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, with Anthony Pappalardo and Adam Abada), a researcher, public speaker and co-founder of Respect is Rad / Consent is Rad, We Skate QLD, and SSHRED. The Consent is Rad campaign won equal 1st place from Skate Like A Girl (2023) and 2nd place from Exposure Skate (2021) for the Social Projects of the Year Awards. 

Recognising her work in growing community-participation and creative programming for inclusive environments in skateboarding, Indigo won 1st Place for the QLD Government Individual Achievement Award from Outdoors QLD (2024). She is also the recipient of a  NSW Churchill Fellowship (2024 - 2025) and an Hon. John Oxley Fellowship, QLD State Library (2025).  She is also now an Advanced Olympic Research Grant Programme Recipient 2025-2027, working at SSSHARC in parntership with Skateistan exploring the promotion of gender equity, inclusion and sustainability through understanding skateboarding and the Olympics and the perspectives of community-led skate groups.

SkateCER is a platform to continue her work on skateboarding, building inclusive environments and doing research on the remarkable world of individuals and groups in skateboarding.

Websites:

https://indigowilling.wordpress.com

www.skatecreateeducateandregenerate.com 

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/goodwillinghunting

Email: indigo.willing [at] sydney.edu.au

SSSHARC Director

Professor Lee Wallace - Director, Sydney Social Science and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC), The University of Sydney. 

Professor Lee Wallace is the Director of SSSHARC at The University of Sydney as well as steering social enterprise projects and the Research Impact Accelerator program. Wallace has won awards for her expertise and senior mentoring, including early career researchers and academics with non-traditional outputs with high social impact.

SSSHARC is a collaborative research space designed to advance innovative research partnerships and methodologies across the humanities and social sciences. They have a commitment to research excellence and knowledge sharing. 

SSSHARC broker and facilitate research exchange between University of Sydney researchers and their outside interlocuters via visiting fellowships, exchanges and a range of in-house initiatives designed to build authentic research partnerships that will grow and change to meet the demands of the future.

Website:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/our-research/centres-institutes-and-groups/sydney-social-sciences-and-humanities-advanced-research-centre.html

Professor Alex Broom, Director, Centre for Healthy Societies, the flagship centre for School of Social and Political Sciences (SSPS) at The University’ of Sydney. Bio

Adjunct Associate Professor HY Willam Chan, School of Architecture, University of Technology Sydney. Youngest-ever city councillor for Sydney’s governing team, advocate for future generations and urbanisation. Bio

Dr Xavier Ho, Lecturer in Interactive Design, Monash Art, Design and Architecture, Monash University. Researcher and Queer Games Designer, XYX Labs and Fellow at HISS, SSSHARC. Bio

Sue McGill, Participation Growth Director, Australian Sports Commission and skateboarder. Bio

Dr Victoria Rawlings, DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, The University of Sydney. Sport and education expert. Member SSSHARC and NSW LGBTIQ+ Advisory Council. Bio

Student, Post-Graduate and Post-Doctoral Academic Advisory Group Members (Australia) 2025

Aaron Christiansen, skateboarder, skate design consultant and landscape architect hons. candidate, UNSW

Dr Ben Duester, skateboarder, skateboarder, co-founder of the SSHRED (Skateboarding, Sustainability, Health Research and Environmental Design) network, cultural sociologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Musicology at the University of Göttingen

Alicia Mardones, roller skater and MA candidate, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, USYD

Nicky Hayes, Founder, Spinifex Skateboards First Nations company

Sarah Huston, skateboarder and founder of Yeah Girl Media

Anastasija Kukić, graduate of architecture and sponsored roller skater, Chaya Skates

Timothy Lachlan, WCMX and Adaptive Skateboarding Australia, Sporting Wheelies Ambassador, occupational therapist, WCMX rider

Miljana Miljevic, Co-Founder, We Skate QLD and Respect is Rad / Consent is Rad

Evie Ryder, Co-Founder, We Skate QLD and Respect is Rad / Consent is Rad

Daniel Vincent, Skateboarder, artist, skate industry and Co-founder Brisbane Skateboarding Association

Sam Whyte, Founder, Foenix Cruisers Women’s Skate Group, Sydney

International Advisory Group Members 2025

Farran Golding, Editor-at-large for Quartersnacks, associate editor at Closer Skateboarding, Founder and editorial director of Skate Bylines, freelance journalist. Website

More tba

Also see our partners, sponsors and supporters page
SkateCER logo by Daniel Vincent.

2024 Event Partners and Principal Co-Investigators

Dr Sanné Mestrom – Art/Play/Risk 2024 Principal Collaborator and Research Partner.

Dr. Mestrom is a Public artist, DECRA fellow an internationally recognised and award winning artist with extensive exhibtions and residencies, and her practice-led research seeks to incorporate “play” into a socially engaged practice as a means to question the social consequences of urban design. Her current research investigates ways that art in public places – and urban design more broadly – can become critically integrated, inclusive and interactive spaces. To do so, her projects bring together sculpture and the body to examine the role of art in rewriting current definitions of ‘play’ as relating to the physical, experiential and ideological conditions of ‘place’.

Creating temporary and permanent sculptural forms that respond to the built environment and our movement through it, softens the separation of art and everyday life; it is through this ‘softness’ that play has the potential to open up a space to escape certain logics, and denying logic is itself a subversive – and therefore political– action. Read more about award winning work in Vogue 2017 and her recent solo show in Vogue 2024.

Websites:

https://www.artplayrisk.com.au

https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/sanne-mestrom.html

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanne_mestrom/

Associate Professor Lian Loke – 2024 Principal collaborator and research partner.

ElectroSk8 curator 2019. based at the school of architecture, design and planning.

Dr Lian Loke is an Associate Professor in Interaction Design at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. She is a member of the Design Lab, the Affective Interactions Lab and the Urban Interfaces Lab.

Lian’s research in the multi-disciplinary field of human-computer interaction studies the interactivity of humans and machines through a choreographic and somaesthetic lens. It is characterised by the translation of embodied knowledge from dance and somatics into an aesthetics of interaction that radically integrates epistemologies of practice from the arts and sciences. Her research explores how to design embodied and movement-based interactions and experiences with emerging technologies that support human agency, creative expression, skill and vitality. Her enduring interest in dance and the kinaesthetic imagination drives creative research into kinetic expression, with projects exploring how humans and robots can collaboratively interact through movement and gesture in a range of contexts from the personal and domestic to industrial. Research into body-focused interactive experiences includes projects on meditation and the use of sound, brainwave, breath and motion sensors as technologies for orchestrating attentional focus.

Websites:

https://www.sydney.edu.au/architecture/about/our-people/academic-staff/lian-loke.html

http://www.lianloke.com/electrosk8.html

Key Research Assistance

2024

SkateCER Research Assistants (qualitative data generation including filming and visual data, community / skater-informed insights and project design consultation)

Alicia Mardones Saavedra, roller skater and MA candidate, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, USYD – Instagram

Aaron Christiansen, landscape architecture student, BA Hons program, UNSW – Instagram

Art/Play/Risk Research Assistants

Nadia Odlum, artist, PhD Candidate USYD and research assistant, Art/Play/Risk – Website, About and Instagram

Caitlin Roseby, architect, CAD sessions – Instagram