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10. Alternative Mobility Cultures and the Resurgence of Hitch-hiking
Michael O'Regan
Slow Tourism: Experiences and Mobilities, Volume: 54, Pages: 128 - 142
Swansea University Author: Michael O'Regan
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DOI (Published version): 10.21832/9781845412821-012
Abstract
While tourist mobilities occur at a range of spatial scales, the ways in which tourists move, dwell and communicate have been understudied and under-theorised. Their geographic movement has often been stereotyped as being produced by an embodied tourist habitus that is continually developing within...
| Published in: | Slow Tourism: Experiences and Mobilities |
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| ISBN: | 9781845412821 |
| Published: |
Channel View Publications
2012
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| Online Access: |
http://dx.doi.org/10.21832/9781845412821-012 |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa58351 |
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| Abstract: |
While tourist mobilities occur at a range of spatial scales, the ways in which tourists move, dwell and communicate have been understudied and under-theorised. Their geographic movement has often been stereotyped as being produced by an embodied tourist habitus that is continually developing within a hegemonic tourist culture. Tourist mobilities are related ‘practices’ that are strategically engineered through powerful media discourses, often intensified by transport and service providers who offer access to peoples, places and cultures in all corners of the globe. This chapter, however, argues that individuals can also use mobility to seek new solidarities, experiences, challenges and feelings; sustaining mobility cultures that comprise inter-subjective and co-operative acts that enable individuals to move, communi-cate and dwell in more dynamic, complex ways.I examine one alternative way of practicing mobility, a creative bodily practice that seems to work outside regulatory processes and the cultural and technological achievements accelerated by tourist cultures and modern industrial societies. The practice of hitch-hiking, governed through appeals to ‘freedom’ and an individual desire to inscribe one’s own rhythm on the world, offers both geographical movement and a way into an alternative mobility culture that gives value to the turbulence, risk, friction, slower speeds and social exchange it engenders. This chapter gains insights into the practice by understanding hitch-hikers’ attitudes towards mobility, describ-ing how their performance of ‘motorscapes’ creates border-crossing geogra-phies of circulation, multi-locationality and exchange. I argue that their resistant mobilities unsettle the familiar and expected ways of moving, dwelling and doing as they trade speed, convenience and time (rather than cash) for experiences, encounters and connections |
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| Item Description: |
Book edited by: Simone Fullagar, Kevin Markwell and Erica Wilson |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Start Page: |
128 |
| End Page: |
142 |