ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that geographic movement can produce identification and meanings beyond state-led mobility politics, religious certainties and even nationalistic and touristic discourses. Innovations in communications, transport and information technology leads to re-jigged routines, conventions and order as people enact, perform, and combine mobility and stillness in new or re-imagined ways. The chapter explores the practice of hitchhiking; an alternative way of practicing mobility, a bodily practice that individuals 'do' which is self-conscious and 'performative', since it is largely performed through objects, people and infrastructures; the 'necessary components of many practices'. Worldwide communications, trade and technologies have given a new impetus to human mobility, contemporary societies increasingly organized around movement, where innovations in transportation and communications form the backbone of a more accelerating and more interconnected world. The chapter argues that the practice has become ideologically and physically constituted across nations, websites and gatherings and there in enabling individuals to forage their way into or demonstrate an alternative life trajectory.
