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Bill Stoever hitchhiked some 50,000 miles in the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He recounts the triumphs and discomforts, the glorious adventures and lonely miseries, the dangers, diseases and detentions, the nice guys, weirdos and women that he experienced in 86 countries.

The first English-language social science book to comprehensively explore hitchhiking in the contemporary era in the West, this volume covers a lot of ground—it goes to and fro, in an echo of the modus operandi of most hitchhiking journeys. As scarification, piercings, and tattoos move from the counter-culture to popular culture, hitchhiking has remained an activity apart. Yet, with the assistance of virtual platforms and through its ever-growing memorialisation in literature and the arts, hitchhiking persists into the 21st century, despite the many social anxieties surrounding it. The themes addressed here thus include: adventure; gender; fear and trust; freedom and existential travel; road and transport infrastructures; communities of protest and resistance; civic surveillance and risk ecologies.

Recounts the author's experiences hitchhiking on a bet all the way around Ireland with a small refrigerator, and shares his impressions of the people and places along the way.

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.

Driving with strangers is an ambitious, timely and intellectually eclectic contribution to how we think about mobility, the rationale behind its different forms and why our philosophy of travel and societal structures are closely related. The book uses a century of hitchhiking across contrasting national contexts to understand the relationship between sharing the road, political economy and social structure. Purkis offers a 'vagabond sociological perspective', which explores power within a society, as seen from the kerbside. This is outlined using a series of theoretical touchstones, central to the history of hitchhiking: relative levels of freedom, trust, human nature, 'gift' or 'experience-based' economics, risk, cooperation, empathy and ecology. Drawing on progressive sociological and critical anthropological traditions the book builds a different vision of social structures, political-economy and human capability to help empower those fighting ecological apocalypse and societal breakdown.