Andrew T Warren

‘Talking Shit over a Brew after a Good Session with your Mates’: surfing, space and masculinity

Abstract In this paper we critically engage with the masculinities of a group of young men who surf shortboards by investigating their love of surfing at breaks they have made their own. The aim of our paper is to reveal the fluid qualities of surfing masculinities by examining how surfing subjectivities are bound up with the spatial, discursive and the embodied. Becoming a ‘local’, and a man, at surf-breaks requires this group sharing the pleasures and pain of producing themselves as surfers. We demonstrate how emotions of pride and shame within the bonds of mateship play a crucial role in maintaining the culturally valued form of masculinity. We conclude how thinking spatially is helpful in underscoring the variability found in surfing masculinities at different breaks and conditions.

Cool places, creative places? Community perceptions of cultural vitality in the suburbs

This article stems from a project examining cultural assets in Wollongong – a medium-sized Australian city with a decentralized and linear suburban pattern that challenges orthodox binaries of inner-city bohemia/outer-suburban domesticity. In Wollongong we documented community perceptions of cultural assets across this unusual setting, through a simple public research method. At the city’s largest annual festival we recruited the general public to nominate the city’s most ‘cool’ and ‘creative’ places, by drawing on a map of Wollongong and telling their stories. Hand-drawn maps from 205 participants were combined in a Geographical Information System and 50 hours of stories transcribed for qualitative analysis. Over 2300 places were identified. Among them were some surprising results: although places known for the arts and bohemian creative industries figured prominently, these were not only in the inner-city but in beachside suburbs with unique cultural histories. Also, a range of affective engagements with place, including unconventional forms of creativity, were described in industrial and blue-collar suburbs. Network topology analysis by place of residence also revealed the extent of localism, as well as specializations and aggrandizements among suburbs. Our conclusions are threefold: first, that ‘creativity’ is relationally situated and linked across all parts of the city; second, that decentralized forms of small-scale cultural infrastructure provision are vital for vernacular cultural pursuits; and, third, that ‘creativity’ is a polysemic and contested category – only ever partially revealing the contours of cultural vitality in the suburbs.

Indigenous Hip-hop: overcoming marginality, encountering constraints

Abstract This paper discusses the creative and contemporary performances of young Indigenous hip-hoppers in two seemingly disparate places (Nowra, NSW, and Torres Strait Islands, QLD). Visiting two Indigenous hip-hop groups from these places—and drawing on interviews and participant observation—we explore the way in which emerging technologies, festivals, programs and online networking have helped enable unique forms of music making. In contrast to racist discourses depicting Indigenous youth as idle or inactive, our research participants demonstrated musical aspiration, creativity and a desire to express love of country and culture. Rather than assume cities and urban centres are hubs for creativity, hip-hop production is geographically mobile, operating in locations removed from large population centres. Indigenous hip-hop links up-and-coming with more experienced performers in what amounts to a semi-formal, political, transnational and anti-colonial creative industry. Geographical distance remains an ongoing challenge, but more than this, wider patron discourses framing what is expected from ‘proper’ Indigenous performance are the more profound coalface of marginalisation.

Aboriginal youth, hip hop and the politics of identification

Abstract This paper explores the identity work taking place around contemporary subcultural hip hop amongst Australian indigenous youth in two disadvantaged urban locations. Previous work on Aboriginal hip hop has been attentive to the interface between tradition and modernity. However, existing scholarship has lacked a deeper ethnographic understanding of the dynamics between youth and parent cultures, and the tensions between the two generations. This article is based on research with young hip hop enthusiasts, community activists and educators. It deals with the cultural politics of identification and sees hip hop practice as associated with a process in which Aboriginality is crystallized as a principal affiliation and as offering an account for experiences of social marginalization. Far from being an outlet for expressing a prior or essential Aboriginality, hip hop as cultural practice is associated with the production of particular identifications.

Crafting masculinities: gender, culture and emotion at work in the surfboard industry

This article examines the masculinities of male workers in the context of an emotionally rich form of labour: surfboard-making. Contributing to emerging research around the emotional and embodied dimensions of mens working lives, the article maps the cultural, emotional and embodied dimensions of work onto masculine identity construction. Combining cultural economy theory, emotional geographies and in-depth ethnographic methods, I reveal how surfboard-making has become a gendered form of work; how jobs rely on (and impact) the body and what surfboard-making means to workers outside of financial returns. Following a manual labour process, and informed by Western surfing subculture, commercial surfboard-making has layered onto male bodies. Men perform ‘blokey’ masculinities in relation with one another. However, doing manual craftwork evokes close, personal interaction; among co-workers but also through engagements with place and local customers. Felt, embodied craft skills help workers personalise boards for individual customers and local breaks. Beneath masculine work cultures and pretensions, surfboard-making is a deeply emotional and embodied work. Labour is dependent on haptic knowledge: sense of touch, bodily movement and eye for detail. Contrasting their blokey masculinity, surfboard-makers rely on intimate links between their bodies, tools, materials, customers and surfing places. These ‘strong bodied’ men articulate a ‘passion’ and ‘love’ for ‘soulful’ jobs, demonstrating how waged work comprises alternative masculinities, shaped by working culture, relations and labour processes. A cultural economy framework and emotionally engaged research approach are valuable for challenging hegemonic masculinity, important for achieving more inclusive, tolerant and equitable workplaces.

A Country that Makes Things

The announcement in August 2011 that BlueScope Steel was about to close one of its Port Kembla blast furnaces and cease steel exports quickly spurred public debate, not just about steel but about the very future of manufacturing in Australia. With an elevated Australian dollar, job losses have followed in garment-making, car manufacturing and aluminium smelting. Even the iconic Australian fly-spray Mortein is now heading for offshore production. Australian Workers’ Union National Secretary Paul Howes thus suggested: ‘The question the Australian community needs to ask itself*is do we want to be a country that still makes things? Do we want to value-add to our natural resources, or do we want to become just one big sandpit for China and a tourism resort for North Asia?’ (quoted on ABC Radio 22 August 2011, 8:10 a.m.). In this commentary we want to argue that geographers have an important potential role in this debate, providing contrasting opinion to market economists who have thus far dominated the discussion. Economists of free-market persuasion have been quick to suggest that the decline of manufacturing is inevitable, part of a broader, permanent shift away from material production to the ‘knowledge’ economy and dependence on lucrative minerals exports. The Sydney Morning Herald’s economics editor, Ross Gittins, for example, editorialised that the decline in manufacturing in Australia was part of a ‘historic shift in the structure of the global economy as the Industrial Revolution finally reaches the developing countries’ (Sydney Morning Herald 31 August 2011). According to this argument (and one that Julia Gillard also appears to favour), all rich countries such as Australia must now find other things to do to replace manufacturing: dig up resources to supply factories in China or focus on innovation, where the greatest proportion of the value of a product is in its intellectual or design content, not its material fabrication*exporting ‘know-how’ rather than physical commodities. Contrasting with manufacturing’s seemingly demeaning, lowly work, for Gittins, ‘the knowledge economy is about highly educated and skilled workers . . . Jobs in the knowledge economy are clean, safe, value-adding, highly paid and intellectually satisfying’. The Herald’s business editor and ex-television commentator, Michael Pascoe, agrees: ‘Australia’s never going back to having armies of people sewing buttons on shirts and gluing shoes together. Or at least, we should hope not’ (Sydney Morning Herald 31 August 2011). For Pascoe, like Gittins, those wanting to maintain manufacturing in Australia merely ‘want to be frozen in the past’. Education, rather than protecting existing manufacturing jobs, is the answer. Australian Geographer, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 109 113, June 2012

Geographic Information Technologies for cultural research: cultural mapping and the prospects of colliding epistemologies

This article discusses potential applications of Geographic Information Technologies in cultural research – amidst concern that confusion surrounds what these technologies are, and how they might be used. We discuss the adoption of Geographic Information Technologies in our own cultural research projects, motivated by empirical shortcomings with existing creative industries and cultural planning research methods, coupled with a desire to more fully explore the geography of cultural life within Australian cities. Geographic Information Technologies can comprise a range of technologies (proprietary GIS software systems, GPS, web mapping) that seek to accumulate geographical information for analysis within computer database systems. In our projects, Geographic Information Technologies enabled spatially sensitive questions about creative activity, affective links to city environments and cultural vitality (asked in interviews and focus groups) to be linked to central map databases. “Collisions of epistemologies” (Brown & Knopp, 2008) were made possible, dissolving boundaries between qualitative and quantitative methods, and connecting our philosophical commitment to everyday, vernacular forms of culture to matters of cultural planning. Results showed a refreshing amount of creative activity occurring beyond visible “hubs”, in suburbs and the vernacular spaces of everyday life. Moreover, cultural life – and creative activities more specifically – was layered, localized and multifaceted within cities, in ways that preclude singular generalizations. Geographic Information Technologies and maps – with their capacities to capture complexity and layered phenomena – helped communicate such findings in digestible formats, to a range of community and government audiences.

Resource-Sensitive Global Production Networks: Reconfigured Geographies of Timber and Acoustic Guitar Manufacturing

Abstract This article examines how resource materiality, scarcity, and evolving international environmental regulation shape global production networks (GPNs). Nature-facing elements, including resource scarcity and environmental regulation, have seldom featured in GPN analysis. So, too, GPN analysis emphasizes spatial relations between network actors over temporal change. We extend GPN theorization through a temporal analysis of industrial change, connecting manufacturing to upstream resource materialities and shifting regulation, and to downstream consumers increasingly concerned with provenance and material stewardship. To illustrate, we document a resource-sensitive GPN—acoustic guitar manufacturing—where scarcity of select raw materials (tonewoods) with material qualities of resonance, strength, and beauty, as well as tighter regulation, has spawned shifting economic geographies of new actors who influence the whole GPN. Such actors include specialist extraction firms, salvagers, traders, verification consultants, and customs agents who innovate in procurement and raw material supply risk management. Traditional large guitar manufacturing firms have struggled with regulation and securing consistent resource supply, although smaller lead manufacturing firms have creatively responded via novel procurement methods and marketing, developing closely bound, iterative relationships with specialist timber harvesters, traders, and with emotionally attached consumers. A cohort of tonewood supply firms and guitar manufacturers—especially in Australia, the Pacific Northwest and Canada, key locations of both resource and design expertise—have together altered material stewardship practices and commodity production. Niche strategies derive exchange value from rarity and resource innovation, embracing raw material variability, inconsistent supply, and the need for alternatives. How firms adapt to resource supply security risks, we argue, is an imperative question for GPN analysis.

Killing Sharks: cultures and politics of encounter and the sea

Australia Day 2014 began badly for sharks. The day before-25 January-lines of large baited hooks were rolled out, 1 km from the shore along some of Western Australias most popular beaches. Within 24 hours the first shark was caught. Hauled alongside a boat, the animal was shot four times in the head with a rifle and its body dumped further offshore. It was a 3m tiger shark.

Making surfboards: Emergence of a trans-pacific cultural industry

ABSTRACT This paper contributes to an emerging postcolonial literature on the history of surfing by documenting the material cultural practice of surfboard making across Hawai‘i, California and Australia. It outlines what is known of precolonial surfboard-making practices in Hawai‘i and then traces important 20th-century advances in design. In contrast to popular histories of surfing that emphasise Hawaiian ‘tradition’ versus Californian and Australian ‘innovators’, this paper establishes the links, exchanges and information flows that informed evolving practices of surfboard making. Such links, exchanges and information flows were trans-Pacific in nature, even from the early 20th century, and were utterly dependent on both Hawaiian antecedents and contemporary innovations. Although not without contestation, the emergence of surfboard making as a 20th-century trans-Pacific cultural industry was premised on generosity, a sense of artisan brotherhood and an omnipresent thirst in distant corners of the Pacific Ocean for a better way to ride its waves.