In this episode, Glen interviews Andy Mason about his latest underground comix, Apocalypse WOW! Revisited (2025). While the starting point may be surfing and Muizenberg Beach in Cape Town, South Africa, the episode covers a range of topics beyond the beach, including how the past, present and future South may be represented in comic art.

In this episode we continue our deep duck dive into the history of surfing in Africa as part of wider scholarly work within critical surf studies and the blue humanities. This episode is Part 2 of a two part series on the topic. Part 2 focuses on surfing in Africa during the modern era, from c. early 1900s to the present. We travel from South Africa to Morocco and provide a case study of the diffusion of the sport of surfing in the West African country of Liberia.

In this episode we dive into the history of surfing in Africa as part of wider scholarly work within critical surf studies and the blue humanities. This episode is Part 1 of a two part series on the topic. 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. 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.

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 how many factors it does not include, particularly in terms of access. We then turn to discussing fairness in surfing in particular, and how loaded the term is, given that surfing is a subjectively judged sport, and that the playing field is anything but controlled (a key feature of fairness in other sports). The episode ends with Karen going on a rant about the ridiculousness of bans on trans women in sport, and how it really isn't the big issue everyone seems to think it is.

In this episode we discuss why history matters, who makes surfing history, in what forms surf history is produced (from the surf media and surf films to surf museums), and the uses of surfing history.  We focus on Kevin Dawson's Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) as an important contribution of historical knowledge about Atlantic Africans' aquatic practices in West Africa, including swimming and surfing. We close of the episode by providing our take on why unsettling surf history is important for the production of knowledge about surfing’s pasts in the Global South. 

In this introductory episode of the The Deep Duck Dive Podcast, we introduce you to the podcast and ourselves as academics living and surfing in the global South (South Africa). The podcast seeks to engage with the oceanic turn in the global South by focusing on issues that matter within surfing as a lifestyle sport. As co-hosts, we have approached podcasting as forms of public pedagogy and public scholarship.