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While competition-based team sports remain dominant in community and sport-for-development programs, researchers are exploring the value of alternative, less "sportized" activities such as lifestyle/action sports. In this paper, we explore the ways in which surfing is being used in development programs in Aotearoa/New Zealand, examining the perceived social benefits and impact. Our methods involved: (a) mapping the range of surfing projects; and (b) 8 in-depth interviews with program personnel. Widespread conviction in the positive developmental benefits of surfing was evident, and that surfing had a "special" capacity to reform or heal those who participate in it. However, the ways in which individuals' self-developments were promoted appear to be following the traditional sport/youth development path. They focus on policies aimed at improved life chances, equipping youth with the tools for self-improvement and self-management, inculcating self-governance and self-reliance. However, a counter narrative co-existed, highlighting surfing as a freeing experience, which, rather than restoring social order, works to instigate a personal transformation or awakening. Despite the range of challenges presented by surfing as a tool for positive development, surfing presents a potentially "critical alternative" which if sport-for-development programs are to be a form of social change, we should remain open to exploring.

The social media app Instagram has become a popular everyday way to share visual representations of surfing culture and experiences. Providing an alternative to mainstream surf media, images posted on Instagram by women who surf recreationally both disrupt and reinforce the existing sexualisation and differentiation of women in surf culture. Images themselves are not necessarily resistant, yet women are asserting themselves as a voice of surf cultural authority through processes of posting, sharing and engaging with images. While ‘big data’ research about Instagram is proving useful in terms of mapping spaces and movements, this article adopts an ethnographic approach to explore the notion that social media developments are changing possible ways of knowing and representing the world in which we live. Also considered is how lived experiences and social media shape each other in everyday lives and communities.

This paper examines the potential of social theory for enhancing researcher reflexivity and praxis in the ethnographic field. More specifically, we advocate the potential of feminist interpretations of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “regulated liberties” for helping critical ethnographers navigate some of the embodied political and ethical tensions and challenges encountered in male-dominated physical cultures. Drawing upon examples from our fieldwork in surfing and snowboarding cultures, we illustrate some of the strategies we employ to subtly subvert problematic cultural norms and values within these action sport cultures. Engaging the work of poststructural feminist and Bourdieusian scholars, we raise some of the ethical questions and concerns we have experienced as cultural members and feminist researchers while engaging with participants in the waves and on the slopes.

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During my research about women and surfing, I have found writing a blog useful as a tool for doing research in the cultural context of surfing. More than a simply a space to increase transparency in my ethnographic research process, blogging became a method of its own. Linking Elizabeth St Pierre’s discussion of research ‘folds’ with Elspeth Probyn’s encouragement to ‘think the social through myself’, blogging helped to address feminist concerns that research remains relevant to lived cultural understandings and experiences of the women participating. Blogging also helped in developing a language and a style of writing that reflects the experiences of surfing in a culturally meaningful way, and to provide a way of locating my own subjectivity within the research space. Through blogging I have been able to keep fieldnotes and ideas alive, engaged and in exchange throughout the project, moving and shifting through both theory and culture.

This article introduces the special issue on ‘Understanding Blue Spaces’ which examines relationships between blue spaces, sport, physical activity, and wellbeing. The articles progress conversations across humanities, social sciences and inter-disciplinary areas of research on diverse sporting practices, that span local to trans-national contexts. This collection offers new insights into politics, possibilities, and problems of the role of blue spaces in our wellbeing—individually, socially, and ecologically. In addition to outlining the 10 articles in the SI, which include ocean swimming, surfing, sailing/yachting, and waka ama paddling, we contextualize this work, discussing key thematic areas both across these papers, and in the wider interdisciplinary body of work on blue spaces, wellbeing, and sport. Specifically, we outline the role of physical activities and leisure practices in how we access, understand, experience, and develop relationships to seas and oceans, as well as to self, places and communities of human and non-human others. We also discuss the ways in which particular bodies, individuals, and communities (human and more-than-human) are marginalized or excluded, and the need for understanding concepts such as wellbeing, place, and self beyond dominant European traditions. This SI highlights how localised experiences of blue spaces can be, while emphasising the need to recognize diverse cultural, economic, geographic, sociodemographic, and political factors that contribute to a disconnect with, or exclusion from blue spaces, impacting who can use blue spaces, how they can be used, how they can be researched, and how power is reproduced and contested.