I work broadly with problems of place and space and their theorization. My first book was situated in the political and cultural relations between the American West and its borders and Others (Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing, 1999). My second book takes up the local/global dialectic in contexts of contemporary economic restructuring and the subculture of surfing (Surfer Girls in the New World Order). This project, which Duke published in the Fall of 2010, forwards an ethnographically informed social theory about the intergenerational transfers of feminist knowledge happening through surf subcultures under globalization. It offers multi-sited case studies in postwestern travels and dwelling in the Global South and the Transpacific, analyzing them as instances of globalization from below.
Over the years I have written essays about critical regionalism and gender, questions of history in literature and critical theory, Civil Rights literatures and post-Civil Rights political imaginations, and issues of youth politics and girls’ communities under neoliberalism. In the last few years, I have been working with the general claim "I Am Where I Think” of Latin Americanist Walter Mignolo.
Presently I am working on a few projects. One is an essay collection, Other Wests: American West/Américas coming out of a series of faculty seminars about interests shared by US Western and Postwest Studies and Latin American Studies. The seminar is undertaken through the research cluster, “The Local/Global West,” of which I am Chair, in Rice University’s Américas Research Center. Another project is collaborative with the filmmaker and surf photographer Elizabeth Pepin. We are producing for a public audience a series of international surf photographs with commentaries that work from Pepin’s interests in coastal environment issues and my own interests in ethnography, the political effects and affect of countercultures, and contemporary girlhood. I am also completing a memoir, Beyond 766 Valencia.