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.