Barbara and Mike with their book Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea.

Book brings relationship with the sea to the fore

It’s been a big year for sailor and sea kayaker Mike Brown. The University of Waikato Sport and Leisure Studies Senior Lecturer recently completed a 20-day Atlantic crossing by yacht and has co-edited a book on the sea that has just been published.

The book Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea is an account of how the sea has shaped and influenced the lives of 12 people.

“The sea is integral to our lives,” says Dr Brown. “The book’s focus is on how the sea is experienced by people, reflecting their personal connections and how they’re defined as human beings, both individually and collectively.”

One of the chapters is by windsurfer and Professor of Sociology of Sport and Outdoor Education at Buckinghamshire New University Barbara Humberstone, the book’s co-editor. Professor Humberstone has been in New Zealand for a couple of months over the summer on study leave from the UK.

Professor Humberstone says having the sea around her as she was growing up had a powerful effect on her.

“When I wrote my chapter, I started to explore further and found a poem I wrote as a kid about going to the beach. It’s exciting seeing the influence the sea has had on me throughout my life.”

And while the sea is part of our cultural landscape, Dr Brown says it often isn’t thought of as something that constitutes our identity.

“By recording these personal accounts, we want to try and understand how the sea shapes us and in doing so, bring to the fore the importance of a personal relationship with it. If people don’t have an affection for the ocean, then they’re less likely to care for it.”

Dr Brown and Professor Humberstone’s academic paths had crossed at various conferences over the years where they discovered they shared a common interest of being on or in the water.

Knowing of Professor Humberstone’s windsurfing experience and research interests, Dr Brown broached the subject of editing a book with her. She was enthusiastic after seeing the initial rough outline and the project got underway in 2012.

Dr Brown’s own relationship with the sea began when he was young, spending time dinghy sailing and going on to become involved in sail training in the UK, and sailing in the south-west Pacific Ocean.

The book features contributions from academics who are actively engaged with the sea. Each author was approached because of a combination of scholarly expertise and their own experience with the sea. They come from a variety of fields such as geography, sociology and education. They are windsurfers, surf and sea kayakers, sailors, bodyboarders, swimmers and a commercial fishing boat monitor/observer.

Contributors to Seascapes are from New Zealand, Australia and the UK, with several having connections to the University of Waikato: Dr lisahunter, Dr Karen Barbour and bodyboarder and masters student Mihi Nemani, who is of Māori and Samoan descent. Mihi’s chapter highlights the hierarchies of surfing subculture, gender and race, describing how prejudice and bias don’t necessarily disappear at the water’s edge.

“All are people who know the sea and have that personal connection with it,” says Dr Brown. “The book’s publication is very timely as there is a new wave of geographers now looking at the sea and a rise of consciousness in this area.”

Seascapes: Shaped by the Sea, edited by yours truly and Barbara Humberstone is due to be published next month. Full details can be found at: http://ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=20218&edition_id=1209350913

Here are some early reviewers’ comments.

‘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