Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea

Mike Brown is a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato, New Zealand and Barbara Humberstone is a Professor of Sociology of Sport and Outdoor Education at Buckinghamshire New University, UK.

• Contents: Foreword, Philip Steinberg; Introduction, Mike Brown and Barbara Humberstone; Seascapes, Mike Brown; Embodied narratives: being with the sea, Barbara Humberstone; Seaspaces: surfing the sea as pedagogy of self, lisahunter; On being shaped by surfing: experiencing the world of the littoral zone, Jon Anderson; Sailing across the Cook Strait, Robyn Zink; Being a brown bodyboarder, Mihi Nemani; Sailing with Gregory Bateson, Peter Reason; In the middle of the deep blue sea, Karen Barbour; Standing then floating: searching for a sense of sea-place on the South Coast of Australia, Brian Wattchow; In the name of the whale, Robbie Nicol; Unlikely becomings: passion, swimming and learning to love the sea, Karen Throsby; 'Do we keel haul the little %$#@ or chuck him in the chain locker?': how life at sea becomes 'stories to live by' for a woman on a fishing vessel, elke emerald and Fiona Ewing; Embodied narratives and fluid geographies, Barbara Humberstone and Mike Brown; Index.

’How do we engage with the sea? How does it permeate our lives and impact how we think and feel? Bringing together a rich collection of embodied, emotional and sensuous ethnographic narratives, this book is as close as you might get to being at sea from the comfort of your armchair. Thoroughly enjoyable and an important contribution to the literature.’ Kimberley Peters, Aberystwyth University, UK ’A landmark book, Seascapes captures our intimacy with the ocean by exploring how we penetrate the natural world, and vice versa. The authors draw on multiple voices, theories and perspectives, and engage with the ocean in passionate and perceptive narratives that radically recast the sea as a dynamic, living, affective and sentient place.’ Douglas Booth, University of Otago, New Zealand ’Brown and Humberstone’s volume, Seascapes, explores the imaginative, aesthetic and embodied experiences through which people engage with the sea. Through fascinating and diverse auto-ethnographic accounts of surfing, sailing, swimming and, above all, thinking and feeling with the sea, it illuminates the complexities of this vital human-non-human relationship.’ Veronica Strang, Durham University, UK 'Throughout the oceanic descriptions were strongly woven threads of everyday and identity politics, of the human/nature relationship and of what we do as researchers. In their conclusion, Humberstone and Brown, write that ’It is our hope that this collection of narratives provides new ways to contemplate with the sea rather than on or at it’ ... but I think this book does more than that - it provides a new space and approach to contemplate how we do research in other fields and spaces as well.' Leisure Studies