Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnography of hitchhiking, this paper reflects on our long-term relationship with transport infrastructures – helping to assess their impact upon both the built environment and the Earth's ecosystems.

Paper long abstract:

Is the planet headed towards self-destruction? Are cars, motorways and everything that goes along with them culpable for the end of the world as we know it? This paper addresses such eschatological concerns in the realm of vehicle and road ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a landscaped form of resistance and mobile transgression, serves as a type of serious play in the post-COVID era. There are a lot of memento mori features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers, through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns and the search for liberation from social constraint through adventure – death-memory is never very far away from spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. Memento mori is about remembering, about death/eschatology and it is inherently material. An act of the embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialised as an endangered transgression and a dying out form of displacement. Hitching is thus a social and spatial memento mori for an era of the 'Carthulucene', when counter-culture wasn't commodified or as cynically narrativised. Is it thus useful to ask whether we should see the auto-stop phenomenon as a tristesse topic? The sadness here residing in that it hasn't been adequately studied in the humanities or social sciences. Not, at least, until that time when it might possibly be driven to extinction by the fear that strangers are not just potential axe murderers, but carriers of contagious viral pathogens.