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Why hitchhiking is far from dead, with the vagabond sociologist

This article is from Edition 15: Abundance
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Jonathan Purkis
Written by Jonathan Purkis
Sam Firman
Written by Sam Firman
Published on 7th July 2022
9 min read

Hitchhiking is a paradoxical pursuit: abundant possibility rooted in voluntary scarcity. Hitchhiker, ‘vagabond sociologist’ and Driving With Strangers author Jonathan Purkis, far from seeing hitchhiking as a cultural relic, thinks hitchhiking tells us a lot about how we can live better.

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Jonathan Purkis

Jonathan Purkis

Jonathan Purkis is an independent academic, tutor and musician. He grew up in Hull, studied and later taught sociology in several English universities. He has published many works on environmental protest and anarchism and has been collecting information on hitchhiking almost from the day he first stuck his thumb out in 1982. (Since then he has clocked up 40,198 miles and had lifts from 1309 strangers, but does not consider himself officially 'retired'!).

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