A billion operating cars, with people are on the road around 1.1h a day has spawned an emergent, complex system of roads and motorways no longer designed for people. The private car promised to create a system of freedom and liberation with Simmel speaking about ‘the miracle of the road.” Instead, for many commentators, it created car-dependent cultures with banal infrastructural spaces of car parks, filling stations and repair garages to service motorways that structure and produce unsustainable automobilities. These materialities, or infrastructural spaces, however, have also come to influence different mobilities, based on differing socio-cultural-political readings of infrastructure. Inspired by cultural geography, spatial-cultural theory and affective ontologies in the context of research on mobilities, this largely autoethnographic presentation challenges the current thinking about the organization of movement by exploring the embodied mobility of hitchhiking and the corporeal experiences of being a passenger in trucks, buses, and cars on Europe’s roads and motorways. As a hitchhiker, I hope to tell a story about mobilities of friction and flow which both challenges and reaffirms (auto)mobile materialities and identities and disrupts thinking on car-dependent cultures. I argue that hitchhikers are not passive bodies in cars or motorways ramps and service stations, but a mobility culture with its own politics associated with innovative appropriations of existing materialities, to work below the radar, to modify the abstract rhythms of motorways.

Thursday 31 August 2017, Session 2 (11:10 - 12:50)

Abstract
Travel and Tourism are sectors that have increasingly seen “desire paths” or “low friction” built into many systems, technologies, products and services. Travel and tourism is rendered “frictionless”as hotel apps create seamless hotel check – in, transit systems use technology to make journeys more friction free and online platforms such as Airbnb generate the illusory of ‘friction-free’ exchange through the absence of paperwork and frictionless payment systems. While friction is not a new topic for mobilities studies, this paper argues that the concept of friction be placed at the heart of research as the sectors become organised by successful, persuasive, seamless and friction-free practices that overcome the friction of distance. As travel and tourism sectors seek to remove friction for some (connected to signs of class, gender, age, and ability), and force it upon others; this session brings different forms of mobility, turbulence, friction, speed and intensities of encounter to life. By analysing the utopia around frictionless as a heuristic device, the paper challenges our assumptions about where frictionless discourses have emerged from the past and whether its leading to a dystopia future.

As as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science 2017, organised by Bournemouth University, I ran an event about hitchhiking and micro-adventures. You may wonder, when did the practice of hitchhiking need to be thought through social science. By inviting six speakers (hitchhikers and social scientists) to Bournemouth University, we spent 3 hours thinking with and through hitchhiking and micro adventures to explore the modern experiences of passengering, ethical encounters, trust, the cost of speed and acceleration, driverless cars, social entrepreneurship, self-sufficiency, automobility and infrastructure. Other Topics Included –

Hitchhiking and the nature of being a passenger (agency, performances and resistance to standardized categories);
Contrasted affects, bodies and emotions of being on the road;
Role of media and social media in accessibility, inclusion, and diversity of micro adventures;
Systems, technologies and practices linked to friction/ frictionless travel;
The move back towards so-called ‘active’ and human powered mobility cultures that gives value to turbulence, friction, risk and the social exchange they engender;
The future of hitchhiking.
The role of gender, race, class, age and sexuality and other social and intersectional relationships of domination at play;
Understanding and potentially overcoming physical, mental, emotional barriers to microadventures;
Hitchhiking as Sustainable, Subversive Mobilities, Slow Mobilities;