Andrew Warren

• Bachelor of Science - Honours (Class I) PhD in Economic Geography (2012)
• Senior Lecturer at University of Wollongong

How do chronogeographies of creative work map onto, limit or exceed notions of the x-minute city? Prompted by this question, our paper draws on research examining lived experiences of creative work in Sydney, Australia. Through time-based spatial analysis of everyday spaces of diverse creative workers (musicians, theatre producers, actors, playwrig...

This Exchanges commentary adds to recent dialogue in economic geography on how methodological approaches, explanatory goals and political standpoints intersect. Drawing lessons from collaborative projects that have sought to understand the concrete, place-based experiences of labouring in industries amidst capitalist and environmentally induced res...

This report examines the restructuring of Australia's automotive sector, focusing on the shift from domestic manufacturing to a post-production, import-based market, and the growth of the aftermarket sector. It presents data collected from a multi-year project which investigated the spatial and economic aspects of restructuring the automotive sec...

The electric guitar is one of the most important musical instruments and cultural artifacts of the 20th and 21st centuries and enjoys popularity worldwide. Designed for students, this Companion explores electric guitar technology and performance, and the instrument's history and cultural impact. Chapters focused on the social significance of the el...

How does the precarity of creative work iterate with the precarity of creative spaces? In answer, we examine Covid-19 pandemic experiences of workers across diverse creative sectors in Sydney, Australia, drawing upon qualitative mapping research. Our findings highlight divergent experiences of precarity before and during the pandemic: many suffered...

How does place influence the work of global circulation, and how might that work enroll hitherto overlooked modes of collaboration, power, and agency? Geographers recentering labor in analyses of global production and circulation emphasize the labor-capital relation and employer control versus employee resistance. This can limit empirical and polit...

Maritime ports are re-emerging as a focus for research in economic geography. Amidst the rescaling of global value chains, the fragmentation of production, the rise of cargo-mobilities and accompanying labour regimes, researchers have emphasised containerisation, the rise of logistical systems, and the power of lead shipping firms in driving port i...

This article seeks to animate historical resource geographies by uncovering unforeseen material lineages and foregrounding the lived experiences of otherwise unremembered resource workers. We revisit research on the historical resource geographies of the guitar, adapting what McGeachan (2018) calls 'the trace' to connect material archival fragments...

The COVID-19 pandemic and consequent health regulations compelled office-based knowledge workers to work from home (WFH) en masse. Government and employer directives to WFH disrupted common norms of commuting to city office spaces and reshaped the geographies of office-based knowledge work, with potentially lasting implications. Pandemic-induced co...

How are skills struggled over in occupations transforming through evolving technologies? This article contributes a feminist labor geography perspective amidst reinvigorated interest in skills. Within economic geography, human capital approaches view skills as resources measurable through quantitative proxies. Such analyses reveal place-based endow...

After central business districts (CBD) emptied from COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and widespread working-from-home, culture and creativity feature prominently within recovery strategies, enrolling the arts and events to enliven urban precincts and attract people back into city centres. We draw upon resilience theory and creative city policymaking to...

This research report presents data compiled from primary and secondary research associated with the project 'Continuity and change in the Australian industrial landscape'. The wider project is exploring the nature of change and continuity in the Australian industrial landscape through the example of Port Kembla, NSW. Port Kembla is a well-establis...

This data report analyses the labour market of Wollongong, a city on Australia’s southeast coast. Data presented was collected for a research project funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) titled “Economic Geographies of Transition: Beyond Automotive Production” (DE180100492). The project aimed to document structural change in the downstre...

Capitalist commodities have a necessary but overlooked accompaniment: aftermarkets. Aftermarkets are conventionally understood as secondary commercial transactions linked to commodity consumption and circulation. Yet for many products with accelerating design complexity, tighter regulation, growing debt financing, safety, and sustainability concern...

The COVID‐19 coronavirus pandemic has fuelled debate about domestic industry and manufacturing in light of shocks to global supply chains and shortages of medical and personal protective equipment (PPE). Nevertheless, debates have been poorly attuned to geography and history. Calls for reinvigorated domestic manufacturing conceal the degree to whic...

The Anthropocene signals anticipation of unknown ecological volatility. Transformational change necessitates diversified experiments for unpredictable scenarios, accepting that many will fail. This paper uncovers insights on such experiments, from an initially unrelated research project ‘following’ guitar production networks ‘back to the tree’. Acr...

Informed by labour geography's thrust to situate workers as active subjects of analysis, this article examines lived experiences of restructuring at Australia's single largest industrial workplace. Drawing on extended ethnographic research, the article traverses three restructuring outcomes faced by workers and their families: (1) job retention; (2...

Geographical political economy increasingly scrutinises the socio-spatial contexts for brands and branding. Less understood is the influence of subcultures – neo-tribal groups sharing passions, a leisure pursuit or practice - on enterprise formation and the pathways through which brands emerge, trading on perceived authenticity. Subcultural context...

Since the 1990s, creative industries have been promoted as sources of economic growth and investment, and as remedies for urban and regional decline. We focus on creative industries through a global restructuring lens, revisiting Fagan and Webber’s 1994 Global Restructuring: The Australian Experience (Melbourne: Oxford University Press) thesis to c...

Australian guitar manufacturers are increasingly competitive globally, known for quality, design, and sustainability. Also distinguishing Australian guitar making is the use of native timbers—a result of unforeseen historical endowments of available trees from earlier eras of colonial appropriation and State-sponsored planting. We develop a critica...

This article examines how resource materiality, scarcity, and evolving international environmental regulation shape global production networks (GPNs). Nature-facing elements, including resource scarcity and environmental regulation, have seldom featured in GPN analysis. So, too, GPN analysis emphasizes spatial relations between network actors over...

Killing sharks is a popular strategy for reducing risk for beach-goers and ocean-users. But the effectiveness of kill-based strategies is debated and the ecological and economic costs are high. In Western Australia the state government introduced new policy in 2012 in response to shark-related fatalities, to track, catch and destroy sharks deemed t...

This article examines the masculinities of male workers in the context of an emotionally rich form of labour: surfboard-making. Contributing to emerging research around the emotional and embodied dimensions of men's working lives, the article maps the cultural, emotional and embodied dimensions of work onto masculine identity construction. Combinin...

This paper examines the agency of nonunionized workers employed in the surfboard industry. Informing a labor geography approach with cultural economy theory, the paper contributes to the progression of labor geographies beyond the confines of unionized labor-management relations. Using ethnographic methods with 135 workers across thirty-five worksh...

This paper contributes to an emerging postcolonial literature on the history of surfing by documenting the material cultural practice of surfboard making across Hawai‘i, California and Australia. It outlines what is known of precolonial surfboard-making practices in Hawai‘i and then traces important 20th-century advances in design. In contrast to p...

This chapter reflects on the future of surfboard making, with particular emphasis on the challenges, directions, and prospects for surfboard makers. It considers whether the surfboard industry is viable and whether manufactures can maintain uniqueness into the future so that surfboards prevail as finely crafted, cultural artifacts. It argues that t...

Over the last forty years, surfing has emerged from its Pacific islands origins to become a global industry. Since its beginnings more than a thousand years ago, surfing's icon has been the surfboard-its essential instrument, the point of physical connection between human and nature, body and wave. To a surfer, a board is more than a piece of equip...

This book examines surfing and surfboard making as forms of creative production and local cultural heritage. Drawing on observations of thirty-three workshops and interviews with more than 130 workers from Hawaiʻi, Southern California, and east coast Australia between 2008 and 2012, the book tells the story of skilled artisans who grew to prominenc...

This chapter focuses on the automated or mechanized approach to surfboard manufacturing. It examines the impact of automation on the surfboard industry, especially in the relationship between surfers and surfboard makers, between workshops and surfing retailers, and between workshop owners and workers. It shows how computer-shaping technologies suc...

This chapter focuses on surfboard making by hand, drawing on the legacies of earlier craftsmen in workshops in Hawaiʻi, California, and Australia. Hand making surfboards today is an artisanal system of custom production that takes advantage of contemporary design innovations. However, hand-based surfboard manufacturing also relies on tools, knowled...

This chapter examines the phenomenal global growth in the surf industry and particularly the commercialization of surfing beginning in the 1960s. Globalization was apparent even before the surf craze of the 1960s. As early as the opening years of the twentieth century, the governors of Hawaiʻi, plantation owners, and hoteliers were using surfing to...

This chapter examines the gender, emotional, and embodied dimensions of surfboard making. As an extension of U.S. and Australian surfing subculture, the surfboard industry is highly gendered, employing more men than women for manual work. Yet surfboard workshops are settings that require highly tuned embodied skills: a fine sense of feel, keen eye...

This chapter focuses on surfboard making in Hawaiʻi, California, and Australia during the postwar era of foam. Between the late 1940s and mid-1950s, a new foam material was being used in experimental surfboard making: polystyrene or Styrofoam. However, polystyrene foam proved unsuitable for surfboard making, and new type of polyurethane foam emerge...

This chapter focuses on surfboard making across the Pacific, from ancient times to the emergence of the first commercial surfboard makers and workshops in Hawaiʻi, California, and Australia in the 1940s and 1950s. This period encompasses the surfboard's “wooden” era, characterized by gradual changes in designs, materials, production techniques, and...

Over the last forty years, surfing has emerged from its Pacific islands origins to become a global industry. Since its beginnings, surfing's icon has been the surfboard. To a surfer, a board is more than a piece of equipment; it is a symbol, a physical emblem of cultural, social, and emotional meanings. Based on research in Hawaiʻi, southern Califo...

Surfboard-making is concentrated in regions with vibrant surfing subcultures, suitable waves and sufficient expertise in crafting boards, by hand, to suit prevailing coastal conditions. This article charts the rise of the Gold Coast as Australia's most concentrated cluster of surfboard-making, from its origins as do-it-yourself craft in backyards a...

This article discusses the politics and practicalities of research process in a major government-funded, academic/community collaborative research project on cultural assets in Wollongong, a regional industrial city 85 km south of Sydney, Australia. It does so through the theoretical concept of ‘enclosure’, which helps illuminate how policy discour...

This article stems from a project examining cultural assets in Wollongong – a medium-sized Australian city with a decentralized and linear suburban pattern that challenges orthodox binaries of inner-city bohemia/outer-suburban domesticity. In Wollongong we documented community perceptions of cultural assets across this unusual setting, through a si...

This paper hitches a ride with young car enthusiasts to explore how their vehicles catalyse a unique form of vernacular creativity, in a seemingly imperilled industrial city setting. While television and print media regularly demonise young drivers for street racing and ‘hoon’ behaviour, this paper purposely adopts a different perspective, on circu...

This paper explores the identity work taking place around contemporary subcultural hip hop amongst Australian indigenous youth in two disadvantaged urban locations. Previous work on Aboriginal hip hop has been attentive to the interface between tradition and modernity. However, existing scholarship has lacked a deeper ethnographic understanding of...

This article discusses potential applications of Geographic Information Technologies in cultural research – amidst concern that confusion surrounds what these technologies are, and how they might be used. We discuss the adoption of Geographic Information Technologies in our own cultural research projects, motivated by empirical shortcomings with ex...

This paper discusses the creative and contemporary performances of young Indigenous hip-hoppers in two seemingly disparate places (Nowra, NSW, and Torres Strait Islands, QLD). Visiting two Indigenous hip-hop groups from these places—and drawing on interviews and participant observation—we explore the way in which emerging technologies, festivals, p...

In this paper we critically engage with the masculinities of a group of young men who surf shortboards by investigating their love of surfing at breaks they have made their own. The aim of our paper is to reveal the fluid qualities of surfing masculinities by examining how surfing subjectivities are bound up with the spatial, discursive and the emb...