CSR - Blog

The Center for Surf Research and San Diego State University are stoked to announce a multiple world surfing champion and leading advocate for women in surfing as a keynote speaker for the upcoming Impact Zones and Liminal Spaces: The Culture and History of Surfing conference to be held at SDSU from April 26-28. The event is open to the public free of charge.

Tina Nguyen is a long-time surfer and committed driver of sustainability who has witnessed first-hand meaningful impacts resulting from the projects she’s led. She completed her master’s degree in South Africa where she focused her research on sustainable surfing events, comparing the sustainability practices at major pro surfing events in Jeffreys Bay and on the North Shore, Hawaii. With a particular curiosity about what sustainability means for different people in different places, she enjoys working at the intersection of business and sustainability to create tangible benefits for people and the environment.

Los Angeles native, surfer, skater, and SCUBA diver; Apryl Boyle’s undergraduate degree from the University of Tampa is a double major of marine science & chemistry. Her Master’s degree is in Biomedical Science from the department of Biostatistics, Bioinformatics, and Epidemiology at the Medical University of South Carolina. She’s focused her research and advocacy work on sharks and has been featured on Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and other international media. Apryl is working to create Citizen Scientists and advocates for ocean and shark conservation. She is based in Los Angeles and is an independent researcher and advocate.

In 2011 the University of Hawai‘i Press published a book that I wrote called Hawaiian Surfing: Traditions From The Past, the eighth of ten books I’ve written about Hawaii’s beaches, surf spots, and shoreline place names. My intent in writing Hawaiian Surfing was to add to the wealth of information other surf historians have already assembled from non-Hawaiian sources by translating material from a unique archive, the historic Hawaiian-language newspapers. These newspapers were published from 1834 to 1948 and are now online and searchable in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs’ Papakilo Database.

David Matuszak is a native Californian who began surfing in the early 1970s at Huntington Beach. By 1980 (nearly a decade after San O’ opened to the public), he discovered the unique surfing culture at San Onofre and made Old Man’s his second home. Some 30 years later he embarked upon a 6-year odyssey to chronicle San Onofre surfing history and culture.

Denise de Siqueira earned her MSc in Architecture & Urbanism at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil where she conducted pioneering empirical research in Brazil on accessible beaches and adaptive surfing. Denise is a human rights activist, an adaptive surfer and a board member of two NGOs in Brazil on adaptive surfing and coastal preservation.

Surfing can be positioned as a creative industry in line with the constructivist, post- and trans-modern epistemologies of creative industries, fundamentally linked to change, mobilizing creativity as a major asset, a transformational process which generates something new by combining things that already exist. - Anne Gombault

How can the human animal, from individual to global scales, learn to actively generate just, sustainable lifeways as we move into the anthropocene, if at all? - Todd LeVasseur

Frederique Penot is a young lecturer and a researcher at the University of Rennes 2, France, where she teaches her Master students English applied to International Trade, Marketing and Management, as well as the bits she knows about surf economics.

Krista Comer is a Professor of English at Rice University. She is also an Affiliated Scholar of Stanford’s Lane Center for the American West, contributing research to the California Coastal Commission Project.