PLEASE COME!! to a weekend of learning, thinking, discussion, water activity, community, and movement building.
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On Friday, we start with optional water activity near Port Phillip Bay in Frankston, then on to Monash University. We end Sunday afternoon. There is no fee, and affordable lodging is available. Participants contribute “skill-shares,” meaning a resource, skill, or a project update. Skill-shares are done in presentations, or you suggest a format. The tabs to the right on this page show links for making your own presentations, and to apply. See below for Overview Schedule.
Space is limited. Applications due January 20, 2019. Once participant selection is complete, curriculum and logistical details will follow.
DATES: February 1-3, 2019
PLACE: Frankston, Victoria, Australia (Port Phillip Bay + Monash University)
2019 TOPIC: “Respect, Visibility, Action”
The Institute for Women Surfers is pleased to launch the IWS Oceania! Our meeting is co-sponsored by Monash University and Rice University. The theme of the gathering is “Respect, Visibility, Action.”
What do we know about women’s surfing in the watery spaces of Oceania? How well can we picture women’s relationships to the sea? Surfing has been documented through powerful stories about ancient Polynesian society as well as in contemporary postcards, magazines, films, and social media. Yet female participation has been overlooked or reduced to images of girls-in-bikinis. In spite of their extensive contributions to water cultures, women notice they know remarkably little about themselves as producers of water knowledge. Today new histories are being made as women filmmakers, photographers, artists, researchers and writers prioritize the importance of women and girls and their relationships to water culture. Join us for a weekend of sharing, learning, and reimagining our past and present. Take part in workshops, an art exhibition, and film screenings. Develop visual technical skills as we connect with each other through relationships with the sea and commitments to a better world.
Our event brings together women from Australia, Vanuatu, and AotearoaNewZealand, as well as Wales, England, the USA, and with invitations to all in Oceania. IWS Oceania on-site organizer and co-founder is lisahunter of Monash University.
As in years past, the Institute devotes itself to political education of activist leaders, artists, filmmakers, and surf organizations. Participants meet for three days of learning, communal surfing, and skill-sharing presentations. Our goal is to teach one another what we know, support new collaborative feminist relations, including between scholars and community experts. The Institute is about our connections, and through them, the movement for the lives of waterwomen everywhere.
Participant Skill-Shares are big highlights of meetings!
HISTORY The Institute was co-founded in 2014 and conducted its first training at the North County LGBTQ Center in Oceanside, California. We taught one another how to identify confusing contradictions for women in the world of surfing in order to create more just worlds and better activist projects. We took seriously the importance of our relationships to building long term surfeminist movements. The Institute 2015, held at the beautiful Brooks Institute in Ventura, took up the linked topics of Storytelling, Sustainability, and Building a Movement. As a mode of activism in surfing, storytelling can move people to action and to new ways of thinking. But stories are far from simple and the ethics of telling new stories is not straightforward. Our question was: how to sustain new stories and surf movements to create the worlds we value? Many reported on the value of new collaborative relationships to the projects they hoped to do, or were in the thick of doing. The Institute 2017 transformed our work by taking on “Issues of Access.” As a conceptual and practical point of departure, the idea was to explore communities of women who are forced out or simply not thought about due either to official sanctioned policy or due to unofficial cultural practices that exclude (by class and race especially). We identified the importance of geography to issues of access, since what matters in one place is not automatically relevant to another.
A respect for geographical difference led us to expand our work, outside of the USA. In Institute 2018, we conducted the first non-US training, in Wales. IWS Europe (Wales) and an emphasis on “Collaboration” helped to create new networks of feminist support for projects in an environment that, in the past, has pitted women against each other. Those new European networks are thriving. Institute Oceania is the second non-USA training.
