Category: Politics
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Speaking Truth To Power
I first heard about three times longboard world champion and current Carlsbad city council member Cori Schumacher in 2013, at the height of the Roxy/Steph Gilmore controversy. That was an episode that shone a harsh light on some of the more retrograde and toxic attitudes at play in the surf industry; and almost perfectly encapsulated…
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Surfing Formulations: Emerging from the Apolitical
Surfing Formulations: Emerging from the Apolitical The following is an excerpt from a keynote talk I presented at San Diego State University for the “Impact Zones and Liminal Spaces” conference in April of 2019. The SDSU talk intended to build upon and fill out the seminal theoretical work I authored in The Critical Surf Studies…
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“Objects don’t Object”*
Conversations about sexism are exactly like conversations about climate change: an overwhelming amount of empirical evidence exists for the damage it causes and what it specifically looks/acts like, pretty much everyone agrees it’s happening, but the causes, the behaviors, both systemic and subjective, that continue to drive it and make it worse, are often presented…
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Ride the Wave to Victory
The image of surfing is often used to represent a certain kind of American global politics. This photo of Reagan illustrates the point nicely. So does Scott Laderman in his book Empire in Waves.
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The Privilege of Following Your Dreams
I have found that in (nearly) every conversations about and within surfing, the hierarchy of power and privilege is the single most often overlooked underlying assumption to each of these conversations. But I also believe that this open door, this obvious omission, allows the exact rupture needed for intense analysis and change to permeate the…
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“quick someone shoot that… feminist dyke”
How controlling is Big Surfing? What are its mechanisms of control? Is this really the happy-go-lucky lifestyle it professes to be? I’ll leave that to the reader’s discretion to determine. 1) People who disagreed with Chad Wells’ comments are not all “dykes” 2) Asking Big Surfing to enter the 21st century does not equal the…
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Quiksilver and Monsanto: bedfellows
[4/1/2014 See also: Kelly Slater’s Ethical Choice to Leave Quiksilver] [5/29/2013 EDIT: The Reliance Group of industries Quiksilver has joined up with in India deserves its own post. For a taste, see page 6 of this document and this article.] Suicide has become the second leading cause of death in India among young adults. Of…
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Bangladesh: Dying for Fashion
ONE YEAR LATER: 4/24/14. Parent company of REEF and VANS, VF Corp, continues to refuse to sign Bangladesh accord. Updated 5/30 : Along with VOLCOM and REEF, I found BILLABONG men’s shorts, Made in Bangladesh Updated 5/26 : Bangladesh factory banned by Wal-Mart is still used by the VF Corp (see note 2 below), the…
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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Surfing
ob but really look on… Los padres de la hacienda had fought the mud from the periphery of the building for years, mud that was laced in the building’s own genetic-code, mud that dressed the building in droplet skirts when La Virgen wept from heaven (so they said), mud that speckled the interior of the…
