Abstract
This thesis explores how people live life on the road, within vans, buses, and converted vehicles. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in early 2025 amongst people living roadside in Europe, and two weeks of additional fieldwork in the United Kingdom, it examines how privilege, mobility, and labour intersect within and between these mobile communities. Frequently enabled by internet connectivity and widespread automobile usage, vanlifers and digital nomads are fashioning new configurations of work and dwelling that blur the lines between tourism and livelihood. Online representations of these lifestyles often celebrate boundless freedom, yet fieldwork conducted on site with interlocutors suggests that such mobility is heavily and unevenly distributed along lines of class, gender, and nationality. There is a strong connection to people utilizing their established privileges and leveraging these within extant regimes of transnational mobility. This study approaches vandwellers as inhabitants of both physical and epistemological edges, occupying borderlands while navigating complex bureaucratic and technological constraints. The diversity of experiences amongst the roadwellers who contributed to this thesis exemplifies the capacity of peripheries to function as generative sites wherein global inequalities, ecological pressures, and neoliberal fantasies of autonomy converge. The thesis illuminates these contemporary forms of mobility and unsettlement by tracing everyday lives, arguing against perceived misrepresentations of these communities in the public and academic spheres. By the conclusion of fieldwork, I came to understand the machine homes of the vandwellers as crucial laboratories for rethinking freedom, work, ecology, and belonging in an increasingly precarious age.