Socio-spatial Imaginaries and the Art of Escape

We live in an age in which the social order of the European nation-state and previously institutionalised life forms related to religion, traditional gender and family roles, social class and/or territorially are declining (Cortois and Laermans 2018). The weakening of social bonds, the alienation of individual subjects and the reification of human relationships (Harvey 2014) occurs simultaneously with the flourishing ethic of individual self-fulfilment, happiness and achievement (Beck and Beck-Gernshein 2002). Increased individualism, individual wealth, smartphones and access to information (Twenge 2017) have not reduced embodied uncertainties, which challenge the autonomy of the individual and our sense of identity on an existential level. In this age of uncertainty, there is increasing angst regarding individual health and well-being, careers, wealth, family formation, housing and a lack of community (Headlee 2020; Pillemer 2021). As people seek to take control of their lives and become the author of their own story, they are looking elsewhere to construct a meaningful existence and express one's ‘true self’ (Beck and Beck-Gernshein 2002), even if that means we find ourselves resurrecting practices and lifestyles from the past. This freedom to write one's own biography is also embraced by the market, which commands us to be free, to be creative and flexible (from family ties and hierarchical institutions), which is leading to increased precarious work, non-standard employment and periods of unemployment for many across Europe.

As polycrisis, the simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic events impact social, political, economic and cultural landscapes, individuals are again becoming deeply self-oriented. Rather than integrating disruptions and uncertainties into the ordinary, or unite in societal solidarity against them, polycrisis have highlighted division and anomie, which Durkheim (cited in Beck and Beck-Gernshein 2002: 7) sees as ‘a time of overflowing wishes and desires, no longer disciplined by social barriers’. Polycrisis has disrupted imaginary certainties and undermined or transformed fundamental social components. In times of uncertainty, the impulse to escape, opt out and seek a better place, new knowledge, solidarities, connectedness and camaraderie and a better way of living intensifies (Bauman 2007). This escape is often materialised through emancipation from normative life trajectories. The marked rise in personal reflexivity can be seen in the search for new relationships, occupations, partners, lifestyles and living situations, with phrases like the Great Attrition, Great Renegotiation and Great Resignation signifying a search for change. While local socio-cultural, environmental, political and personal conditions remain essential in understanding the growing wish for change, these local desires and aspirations are linked to both local and increasingly global socio-spatial imaginaries, as people re-imagine their everyday social relations, networks and arrangements.

Bob Jessop and Stijn Oosterlynck (2008) describe imaginaries as semiotic orders or ensembles, without tightly defined boundaries, that frames individual subjects’ ‘lived experience of an inordinately complex world and/or guides collective calculation about that world’ (Jessop 2012: 74). They are ‘collectively held and performed visions of desirable futures (or of resistance against the undesirable) . . . animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order’ (Jasanoff 2015: 19). There are many imaginaries within expressivist cultures and specific political and socio-economic contexts. These imaginaries are collectively held notions of desirable futures, and involve investing in, belonging to and contributing to something different, either in the form of temporal moorings and dwellings, or by rooting more substantially to alternative places, cultural arrangements and practices, structures and norms. Many re-signified and re-circulated socio-spatial imaginaries involve global images, ideas, values and different constituencies, people, stakeholders and interests, and when they take social form, can ignite motivation for movement and mobility.

Those with pre-existing privilege are free to explore various post-family relationships and new co-working environments, such as digital nomadism (Thompson 2019). These digital nomads draw on imaginaries to seek temporal moorings and particular work arrangements and practices across Europe, while tourists often draw on medieval imaginaries which ignite the desire to travel (Frost and Frost 2021). In comparison, migrant imaginaries drive the desire to travel to Europe and beyond, to start a new life. Others are compelled to be mobile and move out of necessity (e.g. increasing rental and housing costs, precarious work) or are forced to be mobile. Orientalist imaginaries, by ‘giving prominence to countries perceived to be spiritual and marginalized’ (Stephens 1998: 52), still produce travel narratives that drives contemporary tourism to destinations like Ikaria in Greece, or the La Gomera in the Canary Islands. Dystopian imaginaries are also increasing and orient us towards the future in problematic ways. As ‘spatial imaginaries of the apocalypse are as commonplace as ever’ (Schlosser 2015: 307), doomsday preppers (Garrett 2021), for example, accept dystopian futures by building bunkers in remote locations across Europe.

Other socio-spatial imaginaries offer escape from the dominant and the hegemonic, from relationships, family and careers; from responsibilities and mundane realities and even capitalism itself. They offer escape from the instrumental, the functional, the transactional, the zero sum, from absent futures and escape from greater restrictions, laws and obligations. Mobility, therefore, can be understood as a change of condition in terms of ‘movements, networks and motility’ (Canzler et al. 2008: 2) and can be thought of as an entanglement of the socially shared meanings ascribed to such movement and embodied practice of movement (Cresswell 2010). Mobility, however marginal, remains a central narrative in many imaginaries, such as countercultural imaginaries (Merriman 2009), leading to new or revitalised countercultural communities across Europe.

Countercultural Imaginaries and Values

Countercultural imaginaries, often linked with the radical potential that emerged during the 1960s, is not simply a twentieth-century phenomenon, and has repeatedly shown relevance during times of uncertainty. The countercultural imagination emerged with beat writers in the 1950s, as dominant societal structures were eroded by a succession of events such as the depression of the 1930s, the Second World War, the dawning of the nuclear age and the start of the Cold War (Cresswell 1993: 253–254). Today, individuals are again drawing from circulating countercultural imaginaries or merely their values, where mobility reflects engagement with local and global cultural flows of transnational origin. Many of these countercultural imaginaries overlap and contain values related to mutual aid and collective self-help. Countercultural narratives see mobility as necessary, with the idea that escape can motivate people to set off on the journey from the status quo. While escape can be rooted as much in a search for home as in a rejection of it (Cresswell 1993; Domosh and Seager 2001), it is often characterised as a movement away from an undesirable situation through action, with the hope of ‘advancing’ one's self (Young 1976) away from ‘the conditions of the labour market, the education system, and away from the welfare state and so on’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002: 4).

During the 1960s, many faced a world in transition and uncertainty, due to oppressive regime of post-war homogenisation, uniformity after the Second World War and the threat of thermonuclear war. There was an erosion of faith in the dominant societal structures (Cresswell 1993: 253–254) and ‘romanticism and escapism of travelling exerted a powerful if, for most people, an imaginary, lure’ (McDowell 1996: 413). Applying entirely imaginative characteristics to movement, ‘both in a geographical sense of travelling, and in an existential sense’ (Brake 1990: 100), involves a shift in both geographical and existential co-ordinates, as people use movement to gain distance from prevailing societal normal and officially approved social practices, norms, spaces and even state sanctioned ideologies. Mobility enables people to associate themselves with proximate and distant others, whose bodies and practices generate shared activities, shared codes of communication and even rhythms and language (Toomistu 2016). Mobility takes social form through communities with alternative, horizontal and the non-hierarchical structures or no structures at all.

Countercultural imaginaries with socio-spatial visions of alternative structures, norms, values and practices become known through tales, legends and narratives in written texts, verbal communication and visual representations. These mediums have the power to project, re-signify and re-circulate old and new ideas and solutions that respond to current uncertainties and desires. While Jack Kerouac's On the Road, completely transformed male nomadism into a normalised part of the American ‘countercultural male geographic imagination’ (Domosh and Seager 2001: 118) in the late 1950s and 1960s, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 novel The Difference Engine is widely acknowledged as a foundational steampunk text (Jagoda 2010). Today, books on vanlife (Dooley 2020), off-the-grid living (Powers 2010) and hitchhiking are igniting new desires. Influential writers such as Curtis White (2019) in Living in a World that Can't Be Fixed argues that the only way to save the planet, bypass social antagonisms and build communities is through a strong and vital counterculture. The rise of the internet and the diffusion of symbolic material represents an important development. The gathering and circulation of information and symbolic content amongst individuals is occurring through email, international group chats and discussion boards. Authors, digital creators, poets and filmmakers, in fields where free press and expression is permitted and where the socio-cultural context is accepting (Escribano et al. 2020), create desire by producing inspiring videos and rich expressions of countercultural imagination on YouTube and Instagram pages.

Ideas within socio-spatial imaginaries are naturalised through their circulation, both online and offline, their acceptance embodied in material and embodied practice. Communities often draw on past heroes, spaces, events and pathways, or draw on fictionalised, fantastical, magical or imaginary places and spaces. Kareen Kohn, for example, created Nomads United in 1998, promising unbridled freedom by organising horse caravans to travel through Central and South America and more recently Europe (Grabinsky 2021). The joint pursuit of an imaginary dreamscape like Solarpunk, a movement that envisions a future world characterised by sustainable and regenerative practices and a harmonious coexistence with nature, made inroads into film, YouTube and television before becoming real. Steampunk and its ‘neo-Victorian futurism’ aesthetic were initially found in fiction, before moving into film, graphic novels and music, and then embodied in practices, patterns, rituals and performance in the late 1990s (Onion 2008). Other practices live on in shared memory, with Joshua Lockyer and James Veteto (2015) linking the return of bioregionalism, back to the land, do-it-yourself groups, permaculture and ecovillages directly to countercultural imaginaries formed in the late 1960s.

There is no doubt that elites seek to capture, appropriate, absorb or exploit countercultural related imaginaries, ideas and practices. From skateboarding to yoga and meditation, the over-commodification of particular practices and even lifestyles have led many to believe the exploitation of the counterculture has left only an aesthetic for individual consumption and conformity, even if they are espousing atypical lifestyles (Heath and Potter 2006). While the emergence of the digital nomadism imaginary has seen individuals leave jobs and travel across Europe to seek economic success, it has also provided opportunities for destinations and businesses offering infrastructure, digital nomad visas and even ready-made digital nomad communities (Bozzi 2020). While digital nomad visas, offered by countries such as Georgia, are tailored to fit into a pre-existent taxonomy that includes business travellers and singles out certain practices of mobility as positive and ‘virtuous’, other types of mobility and dwelling are framed as transgressive, negative or degenerative.

While countercultural ideas and communities are always at risk of commodification and assimilation into capitalist orthodoxy (Frank 1997), they have continued to evade total commodification, through continued tactical innovation, if not resistance. While global companies assist surfing imaginaries towards commodification, surfing practices like spiritual soul-surfing persist (Taylor 2007) in places in the Algarve, Portugal. Within mountain climbing imaginaries, the dirtbag mountain climbing lifestyle draws itinerant rock climbers (Rickly-Boyd 2016; Taylor 2010) to places like Masouri in Kalymnos, Greece. Itinerant boat dwellers in London and Amsterdam continue to exist in increasingly generified waterways (Roberts 2017). Other countercultural imaginaries, with values such as DIY ethics and mutual aid, are taking social and material shape in the form new age travellers (Kuhling 2007; Stankov et al. 2021), cosplayers, urban explorers, neo-nomads, vanlifers, wild swimmers, new age travellers, the new gypsies, the Rainbow Family (Schelly 2015), WOOFers, ravers, anti-road protestors (Martin 2014), anti-border activist groups, climate activists (e.g. Extension Rebellion), squatters, off-gridders (Schelly 2017), wild campers, urban nomads (Spradley 1970), tiny house communities (Ford and Gomez Lanier 2017; Shearer and Burton 2021), hitchhikers (O'Regan 2012), roadschoolers (Sotomayor 2022) and circus performers (Comerford 2020). These communities exist across Europe, with Nataša Rogelja Caf (2023), for example, exploring the lives of ‘liveaboards’ in the Mediterranean, after they decided to travel, work and live on sailing boats, while Špela Kalčić (2013) explores European housetruckers (Westerners travelling and living in cars, jeeps, vans, caravans, buses or trucks converted into mobile homes) moving between Europe, West Africa and elsewhere.

Individuals participating in these marginal communities may not represent an individual's ‘wholesale rejection’ of traditional society and may continue to participate in forms of employment. From digital nomads moving to Prague under long-term visas, to those who might play with the aesthetic power of a vanlife lifestyle for a weekend, a reorientation may be short lived, if individuals envision and enact life in the present, rather than pursuing long-term continual transformation and mutation in a different social, cultural and economic sphere or scene. These liquid consumer utopias are built on transience and hyper-individualisation and are a market-mediated expression of individuals’ desires to re-imagine and re-construct reality, and to re-frame the present (Atanasova 2021). Critics such as Andreja Trdina and Dejan Jontes (2022) argue that lifestyles such as vanlife are supported by and fed into the culture and leisure economies. They argue that this ‘elite’ form of travel is largely temporary, commodified and hyper stylised. However, for many participants, this life trajectory has a future orientation, with many investing fully by selling their homes and committing to full participation. Indeed, many countercultural communities are marked by the sentiments of marginality, liminality and constant negotiation against the sedentary norm of the nation-state (Martínez and Laviolette 2016; Kalčić et al. 2023). In joining these communities, individuals may be accepting new norms, tendencies, thinking, beliefs and values that guide behaviour. This new socialisation and secondary habitus may demand individuals ‘relinquish the roots, the fathers, the ancestors, the integrity of the home culture, since such relinquishment is precisely what occasions the vitality of wandering’ (Melehy 2012: 39). As Kerouac notes in On the Road, ‘Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road’ ([1957] 1991: 183).

The book Nomadland and its subsequent award-winning movie shows how broad vanlife imaginaries are and how wide the vanlife spectrum is. Many businesses do seek to construct it as a desirable, exclusive lifestyle through advertising, and some vanlifers do not travel to become part of an affective collective. However, not all vanlifers are travelling based on a strategy of cultural distinction by taking and sharing selfies. Nomadland portrays a reorientation away from utopian dreams of abundance and permanence (Atanasova and Eckhardt 2021a 2021b) towards something, like a protopian future, which can be described as a state that is better than today than yesterday, although it might be only a little better. A failed search for the American/European Dream, and the interpersonal, cultural and structural constraints featured in the book trigger mobility and vanlife as a new mobile strategy (Eager et al. 2022). Nomadland shows how coordination and mutual aid are required and how socially sensitivity widens as the participants in the community manage community bonds and networks. Their agency is bounded by various constraints and mobility regimes, as they choose to become ‘houseless’ to follow work and build a sense of community (Bruder 2019). Therefore, countercultural imaginaries are characterised by a multitude of perspectives, age groups and motivations, given such imaginaries are neither static nor in possession of clear boundaries.

A Crisis of Imagination in Europe?

In an age of uncertainty and polycrisis, markers of ‘progress’ such as owning one's own house or obtaining career advancements are increasingly leading to dead ends and new barriers. While the anthropologist Amitav Ghosh (2016) talks about a crisis of imagination, Geoff Mulgan (2020) argues that universities, political parties, think-tanks and so on focus more on the past and present than the future. However, countercultural imaginaries not only offer individuals an affective collective identity but also pockets of creative social imagination – from co-living, zero-carbon living and radical food systems to ways of organising space and time. Rather than living in the past or ‘doing your own thing’, there is little evidence of hippie nostalgia, radical rootlessness and isolation, as if people live for themselves and themselves only.

Bodies in ‘liberated rhythm’ (Neville 1970) along loosely defined trajectories begin to think of themselves in relation to others, with movement, proximity and mutual aid strengthening and cementing ‘collectivity’ (Maffesoli 1991). Similar to Simmel's forms of sociation, ‘experiencing something together is a factor of socialisation’ and takes on the ‘the function of aggregation and reinforcement’ (Maffesoli 1991: 19). As a taken-for-granted cognitive assumption about the reality of a social world emerges, a commonality of perspectives creates affective solidarities with those encountered and imagined others who are also in the affective embrace. Their effort to escape or evade the dominant culture ignites a level of clustering, sharing and ‘thrown togetherness’ (Massey 2005). As social solidarity, mutual dependency and collectively performed rituals symbolise many countercultural imaginaries, participation also aids transformation and transition. As disparate individuals are faced with ‘the unavoidable challenge of negotiating a here-and-now’ (Massey 2005: 140), they strive to ‘speak, act, and work toward belonging to a world of others’ and ‘simultaneously strive to experience themselves as world makers’ (Jackson 1998: 8).

Socio-spatial imaginaries require sources of stability and security to become testing grounds for alternative ways of living. Rich imaginations can be witnessed on online discussion boards and at specific physical spaces, which sustain mobility and demonstrate individual belonging across space and time. Individuals seek out and exchange and add symbolic material with those who actively participate in the production, consumption and distribution of particular countercultural values and ideas. A sense of common fate, of being in the same boat, being mobile-with and facing the same problems has the impact of ‘enabling the passing on of ideas, emotions and fellow sentiments so that a feeling can become mobile itself’ (Adey 2009: 174). Within these encounters and spaces, invention, collaboration, negotiation and exchange of information and knowledge occur. The social imagination is ignited with stories and plans for desirable and possible futures, and where values, such frugality, restraint and reducing material use are tested and practiced.

These encounters, central to an individual's project of self-formation and agency, can occur both during pause and in movement, which in turn provide ‘participants with a sense of membership grounded in strong emotional experience and a shared sense of ordeal’ (Hetherington 2000: 78). Utilising the infrastructure of social life, participants in particular social worlds are often constantly in movement, but also continually immobile. While mobility can be seen as a kind of infrastructure for the social itself, and is central in spreading socio-spatial imaginaries, spaces help reproduce and continually transform a particular social world through new and renewed relationships as they facilitate the movement of people, things, ideas and information. Nuccio Mazzullo and Tim Ingold (2008: 29) suggest ‘places can only occur along paths of movement’, with specific places enacted, where people are likely to meet by design or by chance.

Ronit Grossman-Horesh (2020) describes an Israeli song circle community, where particular events and places are chosen to encourage participants to imaginatively produce inner (introspective) and outer (communal) connections with others. Specific spaces, which include events, draw people closer and add to the collective memory as participants add their own knowledge, through their own readings, stories, and interpretations that resonate with particular imaginaries. While participants, by and large, are not passive receptors to some written ideology, they do seek to connect aesthetically, or functionally, or both. This may mean dressing in a particular style, donning particular tattoos, taking on particular sociocultural traits and connecting to a specific collective imagination, as well as creating memories and narratives. It also means new and experienced members encounter, contest and build on knowledge, at social, political and cultural projects at spaces and through activities and events.

Many in the vanlife lifestyle travel to vanlife festivals and events, such as the Vanlife Festival in Shrewsbury or Vanlife Eats in Basingstoke, where mobility and place come together and facilitate an alternative social experience. There are hitchhiker gatherings in Europe, such as the annual Hitchgathering, yoga festivals, transformational festivals, retreats and Rainbow Family gatherings. These spaces bring roles and shared imaginaries to life, and are the socio-material basis for sustaining mobile projects and communication. They enable solidarity, intimacy, interaction, interdependency, connectivity, cohesion, relations and collective action. These spaces and events are not construed out of nowhere but involve materialities, politics, legacies, emotions, narratives and memories, and while these temporary places may come and go, along with place-specific resources, they enable people to meet up and do something together (Massey 2005).

The centrality of mobility may not always mean physical movement for all, with imaginaries materialising within the domestic setting, with meanings of home and community continually being renegotiated in the context of changing mobilities and societal transformations. Many who belong to these communities can enable knowledge exchange, and act as points of stability, by hosting social spaces (Verbuč 2021) or facilitating online discussion. Hospitality exchange platforms like bewelcome.org allow members to offer their homes as ‘arrival’ infrastructure for mobile subjects, when values align (Jung and Buhr 2021). Rosi Braidotti (2014: 182) argues, ‘Not all nomads are world travellers; some of the greatest trips can take place without physically moving from one's habitat. It is the subversion of set of conventions that defined the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling’.

Individuals and communities do sometimes anchor and root more substantially to specific places and cultural arrangements. The growth of ecovillages, intentional communities, co-housing, communes and housing co-ops in Europe (Ferrara 2019), provide those involved with a sense of purpose, structure and belonging. These spaces also act as a source of stability and security that sustains a community or mobility related project across time and space (Aufschnaiter et al. 2021). Specific spaces can become central elements in particular social worlds and are functionally important mobility projects. Free cultural spaces, such as BASE (Base for Anarchy and Solidarity in Bristol) or RAAK (Radikale Anti-Anti Kraak) in Amsterdam, for example, might see a seasonal flow of anarchists, artists, the disenfranchised, outcasts, retirees and the impoverished living as urban nomads. They are creating counter-environments and counter-narratives to articulate imaginative futures.

While escape from/to can happen from one's home, many utilise spaces which have not been taken over by the corporate sector and the state, such as the sea, deserts, rainforests, swamps, archipelagos and highlands. These communities utilise striated spaces and, in turn, disrupt coded systems of the state. According to the Global Ecovillage Network, a volunteer organisation, Spain has about ninety ecovillages, many of them based in depopulated and abandoned villages, such as Matavenero, in the León Province. While scholars are often drawn to particular planned places and events, many others are generated through non-predictable meetings between people, or people and material things. A hitchhiker, for example, uses the road system, cars and drivers, leading to the entanglement, spontaneous enactment and sociability of multiple people thrown together along road systems. Their mobilities and the spaces they frequent, such as service stations, become inherently social, if not political (Laviolette 2020). Therefore, from virtual and physical spaces that gather, curate and promote imaginative ideas, these individuals, projects and communities are rekindling imaginaries at a time of polycrisis and increasing uncertainties.

The Contributions in the Special Issue

This special issue of AJEC explores various forms of mobility, dwelling and living, using ethnographically informed research and reflections. Together with this introduction, the four contributions ethnographically and conceptually illustrate gradients and differentials in contemporary escape. Ben Bowles describes the population of itinerant boat dwellers commonly known as ‘boaters’ on British Waterway, compelled to move from place to place every two weeks, due to the necessities of the 1995 British Waterways Act. Rather than simply an ongoing mobility choice and a means of expressing identity, life on the waterways can also be means of survival.

Jonathan Atari and Jackie Feldman ask whether long-distance hiking can be an alternative to the regimentation and alienation of contemporary European life. Through interviews with hikers on the Via Alpina in the European Alps, hiking is found to be an escape from the alienating work-world and sources of uncertainty. Hiking is the better life, and the hikers’ time walking reflects a truer and more authentic self.

Emelie Larsson and Jenny Ingridsdotter highlight some paradoxes and intersections in the lives and social media narratives of three Swedish ‘off the grid’ influencers. Highlighting the complexity of modern escape, their digital entrepreneurship and the search for a deeper meaning in life are perceived both as means towards self-realisation and getting closer to a ‘true’ self. The authors explore the paradox between modernity and ‘simple living’ as influencers reject some aspects of modern life.

Cody Rodriguez enters the social world of vanlife and describes the marginality and constant negotiation against the sedentary norm of the nation state. By detailing the policies and laws that have sprouted up to criminalise the act of living in one's vehicle, the author details the marginality and frustrations that come with vanlife. Just as national legislation can discriminate against homeless people, moves against vanlife and wild camping in Europe indicate that Europe is organised according to sedentary norms. Kalčić et al. (2023) argue there are increased indirect constraints on nomadic life in many European Union countries. For example, vehicles that vanlifers use and the boats that itinerant boat dwellers dwell in are increasingly required to meet high standards regarding moorings, fuel consumption and insurance. As wild camping and parking spots for recreational vehicles home becomes sites of surveillance, certain spaces, regions and even countries are considered hostile by those seeking alternative ways of living, moving and dwelling.

However, the subjects explored in the four articles, who act on the basis of imaginaries that are culturally shared and socially transmitted, suggest a diverse set of subjects, whose im/mobility emerges from shared desire, will, aspirations and claims of belonging and action. The articles explore the impulses that push individuals towards self-investment and describe what holds their subjective emotional investment together over time. The subjects blur existing concepts, given they sometimes resemble tourists and hikers, and at other times travellers, migrants and even commuters. These articles draw attention to the power of imagination to break down create breaks in hierarchical dichotomies, such as tourist and migrant and urban and rural. As individuals coalesce around cracks (O'Regan 2017) and encounter particular activities, moments, spaces and tangible places through and with others, and then go their different ways, a different way of doing or relating, moving, being and belonging emerge. The articles also address the role of materialities, underpinning mobility, the loosely defined trajectories along which subjects move physically and virtually and values such as communal sharing, gifting, reciprocity, knowledge exchange, mutual aid and do-it-yourself.

While the individual projects and communities they belong to may not be seeking to change or disrupt the socio-material order, they do subvert orthodox imaginaries and the everyday ‘real’ lives of people and places across Europe. They indicate that countercultural imaginaries are alive in ‘the minute by minute, day to day social life of individuals as they interact together, as they develop understandings and meanings, as they engage in joint action and respond to each other as they adapt to situations, and as they encounter and move to resolve problems that arise through their circumstances’ (Woods 1996: 37). Endeavouring to move, dwell and belong in a variety of ways that individuals hope will transform themselves, the articles show that individuals are prepared to take risks and leave their comfort zone, and embark on lives and projects, without fully knowing how it will pan out or where they will end up in the long run (Mancinelli and Salazar 2023).

The subjects and communities in this special issue are open to accusations of being too white, too privileged and too nostalgic, their escape made possible by different kinds of power, from the power of technology to the power of images and ideas. (Tuan 1998). However, these articles, I argue, show the desire of subjects working cooperatively and deliberatively to overcome orthodox social imaginaries and escape the slow violence of embodied uncertainties. Mulgan argues it's important to find the right balance between the new and the old, so ‘not discarding the best of the past, but rather finding ways to conserve the most resonant traditions, the fertile rather than sterile heritages, and combining them with the new’ (2002: 32). One might argue that countercultural imaginaries are not radical enough to deal with the root causes of uncertainties such as climate change. However, I argue that rather than simply being linked with the nostalgia or wider histories of imperialism and capitalism, the subjects in this special issue ‘learn bodily’ and put their body on the line to fulfil their desires and creative ambitions. While certain crises like climate change are outrunning societies, many communities are seeking to retreat ahead of it, to imagine and practice forms of human existence that respond to climate change and other crises.

When the authors acknowledge subject privilege, they also point to marginalisation and exclusion. By outlining lines of escape, and promises of safety, sustainability, liveability, spiritual awaking, adventure, community, solidarity and belonging, that once turned into action, can become a turning point for transformation and self-actualisation, “the special issue articles also also show the potentiality of tension, frustration, self-destruction and return. As escapism is not a negative avoidance of the real, it can be undertaken creatively and but often ingeniously foolishly (Tuan 1998). Therefore, subjects in this special issue are swapping one set of uncertainties for another and not eliminating them. As guest editor, I too acknowledge the structural and institutional inequalities amongst different mobile subjects. Whether it's discrimination against those with disabilities, racism within certain communities or the unequal class statuses and positions outlined by Ben Bowles in this special issue, I acknowledge there are barriers for many in Europe hoping to participate in or join a community. While desire might exist, accepting and rationalising existential uncertainties may also be seen as the rational choice to advance and grow.

Conclusion

At a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling, countercultural imaginaries may not offer an alternative to capitalism, since they are social and geographic rather than economic in nature. While burdened with problematic legacies, these imaginaries are also emancipatory, by offering escape from uncertainties caused by external pressures, such as government enforced austerity. The articles in this special issue explore the desires, meanings, commitments, beliefs and structural determinants that lead individuals to escape, and the social and material anchors that sustain their choices. While many of these projects and communities are not explicitly at odds with social convention, countercultural imaginaries and meeting spaces exist because they can be imagined and enacted differently from the current and often orthodox dominant vision which is causing such uncertainties. As anthropologists identify societal problems and trace their sources and effects, the interdisciplinary scholars in this special issue explore imaginaries and possibilities for alternative life courses and pathways to repair, recover, share and restore.