This book presents new contributions in backpacking research from various disciplines, capturing the diversity of backpacker contexts, motives and behaviours. It takes a fresh, critical and reflexive look at over 40 years of backpacking research and seeks to recentre backpacking research before introducing new perspectives on backpacking and global backpacker cultures from previously unexplored perspectives. The chapters examine contemporary backpacker culture and mobilities, and the value and worth of backpacking both for individuals seeking an alternative life course and transformation, and destinations and businesses who value their economic and cultural potential. The volume aims to make sense of current research in order to understand backpacking’s future, and produce new directions for conceptual, theoretical and methodological development and future research. It will be useful for students and researchers in tourism, sociology and anthropology.

In Backpack Ambassadors, Richard Ivan Jobs tells the story of backpacking in Europe in its heyday, the decades after World War II, revealing that these footloose young people were doing more than just exploring for themselves. Rather, with each step, each border crossing, each friendship, they were quietly helping knit the continent together.

Building on previous work on backpacking, this book takes the analysis of backpacker tourism further by engaging both with new theoretical debates into tourism experiences and mobilities as well as with new empirical phenomena such as the rise of the 'flashpacker' and alternative destinations.

Backpackers have shifted from the margins of the travel industry into the global spotlight. This volume explores the international backpacker phenomenon, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives on its meaning, impact and significance. Links are drawn between theory and practice, setting backpacking in its wider social, cultural and economic context.

In the current trend of increasing globalization, relationships are evolving between global and local realities, rich and poor regions of the world and 'old' and 'new' leisure and tourism patterns. The tourist has become an active agent in their travel experiences, moving between and among multiple localities, in an environment of transnational, interconnected social networks. In order to understand the modern tourist, concepts of mobility have begun to be applied to tourism studies and have questioned whether the word tourism is any longer sufficient to describe the complex socio-political milieu of people on the move. Bringing together theoretical and practical issues, this edited volume analyses tourism's wider role as an agent for the mobile modern population of the world. Themes range from post-modern youth and independent mobility to theoretical texts on hypermobility and citizenship within global space and mobility, media and citizenship. Offering a thought-provoking examination of modern tourism, this will be an important text for students of tourism and human geography as well as tourism professionals.

Being mobile in today's world is influenced by many aspects including transnational ties, increased ease of access to transport, growing accessibility to technology, knowledge and information and changing socio-cultural outlooks and values. These factors can all engender a (re)formation of our everyday life and moving - as and for lifestyle - has, in many ways, become both easier and much more complex. This book highlights the crossroads between concepts of lifestyle and the growing body of work on 'mobilities'. The study of lifestyle offers a lens through which to study the kinds of moorings, dwellings, repetitions and routines around which mobilities become socially, culturally and politically meaningful. Bringing together scholars from geography, sociology, tourism, history and beyond, the authors illustrate the breadth and richness of mobilities research through the concept of lifestyle. Organised into four sections, the book begins by dealing with aspects of bodily performance through lifestyle mobility. Section two then looks at how we can use mobile methods within social research, whilst section three explores issues surrounding ideas of mobility, immobility and belonging. Finally, section four draws together a number of chapters that focus on the complexities of identity within mobility. Often drawing on ethnographic research, contributors all share one common feature: they are at the forefront of research into lifestyle mobilities.

Backpacker tourism has shifted from the margins of the travel industry into the mainstream. Backpacker Tourism: Concepts and profiles explores the current state of the international backpacker phenomenon, drawing together different disciplinary perspectives on its meaning, impact and significance. Links are drawn between conceptual issues and case studies, setting backpacking in its wider social, cultural and economic context.