Tag: hydrofeminism

New critical surf studies episodes on The Deep Duck Dive Podcast

~ Glen Thompson

Three more episodes of season one of the The Deep Duck Dive Podcast are now available to listen to and we (co-hosts Karen Graaff and Glen Thompson) paddle out into the waves of social and historical matters relating to surfing.

Episode 2 is on the topic of The Waves Don’t Discriminate. In this episode, we discuss the issue of fairness in sport, and how a term that sounds neutral is in fact heavily politicised. We start with the definition of fairness in sport generally and then turn to fairness in surfing. The episode addresses the bans on trans women in sport, including surfing, and look to the gender politics behind those bans as well as the attempts by sporting bodies to use policies to regulate transgender involvement in sport. Listen to episode two of the podcast here.

Episodes 3 and 4 is a two-part survey the history of surfing in Africa. In Episode 3: History of Surfing in Africa Part 1: The Colonial Archive we focus primarily on the history of surfing in West Africa, which has colonial records of African aquatic activities. This history draws on the historical work of Kevin Dawson which explores, and reclaims, West African aquatic practices and we also speculate on what other historical sources scholars could look to when opening up the archives to find evidence for surfing in the past elsewhere along the extensive African coastline. We focus the period from the early modern period (c. 1500) to the beginning of the twentieth-century (c. early 1900s). Listen to episode of the podcast here.

In Episode 4: History of Surfing in Africa Part 2: The Modern Era we focus on surfing in Africa during the modern era, from c. early 1900s to the present. We cover the topics of surfing and the British Empire and indigenous African surfing practices in West Africa before 1945, the era of “surf discovery” in Africa in the Sixties and Seventies, and then the diffusion of surfing through the processes of surf tourism, non-profit led social development, and sportisation in Africa from the 1990s and 2000s – taking the story up to surfing’s entry into the Olympics in the 2020s. Listen to episode of the podcast here.

Listen to all The Deep Duck Dive Podcast episodes here.

Launch of The Deep Duck Dive Podcast

~ Glen Thompson

Announcement: Co-hosts Glen Thompson (Research Fellow, History Department, University of Stellenbosch) and Karen Graaff (Research Fellow, Women’s and Gender Studies, University of the Western Cape), academics and surfers based in Cape Town, South Africa, have launched The Deep Duck Dive Podcast – a public pedagogy and public scholarship podcast engaging with the oceanic turn in the global South by focusing on issues that matter within surfing as a lifestyle sport.

While the podcast has been a work in progress for some time, see our journal article in Critical Studies in Teaching and Learning published open access here in 2023 for our documentation of our approach to scholarly podcasting and thinking with/in surfing, we launched the podcast on 30 September 2024. We aim to publish new episodes every two weeks.

Season 1 of the podcast opens with a pilot episode introducing the podcast and ourselves. Episode 1 is titled: Surfing history – Why History Matters. The theme for the first season is, What could surfing (be)come, and makes use of hydrocolonialism, hydrofeminism and critical surf studies perspectives to explore the following topics: surfing’s colonial history, the history of surfing in Africa, surfing and social change, discrimination and the waves, inclusive surfing spaces, and surfer environmental consciousness. In these episodes we seek to challenge and subvert surfing’s normalisation of certain raced, gendered, classed, and ableised bodies; both in past and in the present and so re-imagine surfing’s future through a social justice lens as decolonised and inclusive sporting and leisure activity. A Season 2 of the podcast is planned for 2025.

Listen to The Deep Duck Dive Podcast here.