Laurie Parsons
Biographic Data
| ID | 308423 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laurie Parsons |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laurie |
| FAMILY NAME | Parsons |
| SIGNATURE | PARSONS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Royal Holloway University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3461-3468 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 260 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Hotter trends: Working conditions and climate-linked heat stress in the Cambodian garment sector
Under climate change, heatwaves are increasing in frequency, duration and intensity, placing hundreds of millions of workers at risk of impacts to health and livelihoods. The human impact of climate-linked heatwaves is thus a topic of growing academic and policy concern. Nevertheless, assessments and responses to heatwave risk are shaped by data and methodological challenges. Analysis of heat stress risk traditionally relies on a combination of i…
Climate Change and Labor in a Globalized World: Mitigation, Adaptation, Vulnerability
Climate change is increasingly recognized as a labor issue. The world of work is not only a major site of environmental risk, but also a means by which environmental risks are structured and intensified. Nevertheless, climate scholarship has been uneven in its recognition of the diverse dimensions of work in a warming world. As a result, key gaps in knowledge surround the climate changed worker and workplace. Seeking both to outline the landscape…
Thermal mobilities: Heat stress and the right to the city amongst Phnom Penh’s climate vulnerable paratransit workers
As global temperatures rise, excess heat at work is becoming the norm, impacting nearly 2.4 billion workers worldwide, majorly informal labourers in the Global South. This paper investigates how climate change-driven heat exacerbates social and spatial exclusions for Phnom Penh’s paratransit workers, including tuk-tuk and motodop drivers, connecting their struggles to broader climate justice and precarity discourses. Using qualitative interviews,…
Remittances as translocal collateral: How microfinance profitably sustains precarity in Cambodia
In this paper, we explore how commercialised microfinance institutions and banks leverage remittance-related information to assess and provide microfinance loans to households in Cambodia. We argue that (microfinance) debt regimes profitably sustain precarity in the Cambodian translocal context. Building from five studies undertaken between 2014 and 2022, we illustrate our argument through a two-pronged approach. First, we critically unpack the e…
Rest in a Warming Workplace: Resituating the Science and Policy of Non‐Work Under Climate Change
Rest is increasingly presented as a key solution to the challenge of rising workplace temperatures under climate change. Yet, despite this growing importance, the scientific literature often treats the relationship between rest and core temperature simplistically, viewing rest as a passive recovery tool essential for cooling the body and maintaining productivity. We frame this dominant approach as the ‘recovery‐productivity calculus’ that underpi…
Critical climate geographies
Climate change has long been a concern for geographers. Yet in recent years, the relationship between the discipline of human geography and the topic of climate change has evolved. Reflecting this, an especially vibrant area of scholarship is the consolidating field of ‘critical climate geographies’: a field that not only examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of climate change, but also the social, political, economic, and cultural structu…
Climate-linked heat inequality in the global southern workforce: Cambodian workers’ economic and health vulnerability to high core temperatures in five occupational sectors
Under climate change, the risk of heatwaves is increasing worldwide. However, the health risks resulting from heatwaves are uneven. Relatively socially disadvantaged people are disproportionately affected by temperature extremes. This paper explores this point in Cambodia: one of the world's hottest and most humid countries, and a Least Developed Country (LDC) as designated by the UN. The paper evidences the extent of the heat exposure faced by w…
Towards a decolonial heat-health nexus: Disrupters, enablers and energy properties of heat from the 19th century to the present day
Depleted by Debt: “Green” Microfinance, Over‐Indebtedness , and Social Reproduction in Climate‐Vulnerable Cambodia
The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow‐onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adaptative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together orig…
Between the Field and Elsewhere: Using Dialogic Collaborative Autoethnography in Ethnographic Restudies
This article discusses the uses of collaborative autoethnography (CAE) as a tool for reflecting on fieldwork experiences conducted as part of a restudy of two ethnographic studies by Pearl Jephcott from 1954 and 1964. We approach CAE in a novel way; through 'dialogic exchange' which is presented as transcript excerpts. Through this, we demonstrate two major contributions: (a) that 'past' researchers are present, despite their contemporaneous 'abs…
Geography and environment: New conversations, new communities
In this Editorial, the Geo: Geography and Environment Editors reflect on the journal over the past year, highlighting some of the key papers published and ‘ Geo Themes’ being developed: ‘Decolonising Climate Geography’; ‘Climate Change, AI and Sustainability’; ‘Geographies of Energy Futures’. The Editors renew the call for submissions on these topics and put out a new call for Special Section proposals on subjects around the environment, climate …
What's in store for UK climate policy in the next five years? Reflections from environmental leaders past, present and future
In light of the UK's 2024 general election and new government, UK policy on climate change is likely to see a shift in direction. This paper presents the proceedings of an event held at the UK Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) (RGS‐IBG) in February 2024, exploring the path ahead for UK climate policy. Four expert panelists were asked to reflect on the achievements and shortcomings of climate policy over the past five years and to provide insi…
Skeletons, dragons and the ‘climate war’: Geography's colonial legacy and the uneven landscape of environmental knowledge
As climate change becomes more central to geographers' thinking, climate geography as a field is developing a greater sense of self‐awareness. Whilst welcome, the historical legacy of geographic engagement with the climate brings both challenges and opportunities. As a discipline whose founding principle was to interrogate the nexus of the environmental – as well as a field with both appetite and aptitude for a radical interdisciplinarity – clima…
Wakeful Geographies, Wakeful Bodies: Day and Nighttime Rhythms of Indebted Life and Capitalist Enclosure in Cambodia
For a discipline so oriented around the study of wakeful geographies, the lack of direct conceptual engagement with the notion of wakefulness-a cognitive state in which the mind is conscious of, and responsive to, the external world-is all-the-more remarkable. In this article we advance geography by probing and revealing the links that exist between wakefulness and indebted life under capitalism. We show how villagers in rural Cambodia experience…
Globalized Climate Precarity: Environmental Degradation, Disasters, and the International Brick Trade
Climate-linked disasters result when natural hazards meet socioeconomic precarity. Recognizing this, scholarship in recent years has emphasized how the precarity that turns climate-linked hazards into disasters is produced within the same global political economy that enables climate change. Nevertheless, despite growing interest in the ways in which the dynamics of global economic history shapes contemporary hazard vulnerability, less attention …
Geography and environment: A time of change
Around the world, the environmental crisis is deepening. The atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere and terrestrial ecosystems: all are under stress and many living species are being pushed towards extinction. Climate change, a key facet of this crisis, is unfolding rapidly, with glaciers melting in line with worst-case scenarios. Rising global temperatures are fuelling socio-ecological damage with distinctly uneven geographical consequences. We are, for…
From Nottinghamshire to Notting Hill: Contemporary Lessons from Pearl Jephcott’s Ethnographies of ‘Troubled Areas’
The work of largely forgotten sociological researcher Pearl Jephcott is increasingly being recognised for its methodological complexity and innovation, and community-orientated approach. Here we revisit two of Jephcott’s lesser-known works. Yet again both working around issues that attracted great sociological interest in the 1950s and 1960s but were in many ways pioneered by Jephcott. The authors begin by exploring her study of youth delinquency…
Geographies of ruralisation or ruralities? The death and life of a category
The rural sphere has suffered from underrepresentation in recent years in part due to growing interest in the urban. A perhaps equally important aspect of the decline has been the troubling of the spatial boundaries that define the rural and urban among scholars of mobilities and translocality. Exploring the decline of the rural in relation to these literary works, this commentary interrogates current geographical thinking on spatial categories, …
Strategic environmental ignorance: Antipolitical knowledge gaps from drought measurement to adaptation in Cambodia
In shaping environmental policy, knowledge is power. Yet the opposite is also true. Control over the absence of knowledge facilitates certain policy outcomes being deflected, obscured, or magnified in a way that furthers political, personal, or institutional ends. Applying previous work on ignorance studies and agnotology to the development of Cambodian drought policy, the paper demonstrates how data gaps, restrictions on data sharing, and obstac…
Trading disaster: Containers and container thinking in the production of climate precarity
This paper examines how global trade shapes and intensifies disasters. Juxtaposing three basic, everyday consumer goods – a t‐shirt, a brick, and a tea bag – with disasters manifesting in their respective global supply chains, it highlights how climate change, local environmental degradation, and carbon emissions are dynamically shaped by consumption. Analysis of data collected in South and Southeast Asia reveals that local environmental degradat…
Discardscapes of fashion: Commodity biography, patch geographies, and preconsumer garment waste in Cambodia
This paper advances existing research on both the geographies of fashion and the geographies of waste, utilising their shared interests in commodity biography. Empirically, it documents the use of textile waste from export-oriented garment factories in the peri-urban areas of Phnom Penh, Cambodia as fuel for nearby brick-kilns supplying the city’s booming construction sector. Interviews and documentary photography present the forms of living, lab…
A Life in Motion: Exploring Auto/Biographical Exchanges by 'Walking With' Nelson Sullivan
In this article, we combine a number of related elements - YouTube films, autobiographical methods, diaries, letters, and walking - to explore the sociological value of the films of Nelson Sullivan (1948-1989). Sullivan was a film maker who documented New York, and elsewhere, in the mid-late 1980s; however, the films are 'vlogger style' and offer richly detailed, relational, and dialogical accounts of the ever-changing figurations between Nelson …
Debt, (Un)Freedom, and Development: Lessons from contemporary Asia
Geographies of labour in a changing climate
Climate change has profound implications for the geography of work. As the papers in this special section aim to show, changes to the climate – both long and short term – are not experienced directly but through the lens of working life. Those experiencing climate change are not atomistic entities, but connected agents, deeply embedded within global systems: as market traders or factory workers; rural farmers or civil servants. The changing clima…
The Subjective Climate Migrant: Climate Perceptions, Their Determinants, and Relationship to Migration in Cambodia
This article examines the factors shaping the perception of climate change and the relationship between climate change perception and migration. Drawing on a 691-case survey of climate perceptions in Cambodia, it explores three dimensions of climate change perception. The first is the relationship of climate change perceptions to space, geography, and scale. Second is the influence of livelihoods to climate change perceptions, and third is the re…
Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural-urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a 'climate precarity' approach
An emerging body of work has critiqued the concept of climate adaptation, highlighting the structural constraints impeding marginalised communities across the Global South from being able to adapt. This article builds on such work through analysis of debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia, formerly small farmers. It argues that the detrimental impacts of climate change experienced by farmers-turned-workers across the rural - urban divide is due to…
Structuring the emotional landscape of climate change migration: Towards climate mobilities in geography
The literature on climate migration is increasingly concerned with linking the natural-environmental and socio-cultural dimensions of risk response. However, the epistemological disjuncture between ‘objective’ and subjective accounts of the environment is an impediment. In particular, despite clear evidence of mutual relevance, work on the emotional landscape of climate change has remained separate from more systematic analyses. Aiming to resolve…
Compounding crises of social reproduction: Microfinance, over-indebtedness and the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit at a time when microfinance is at its historical peak, with an estimated 139 million microfinance customers globally. Cambodia's microfinance sector is one of the fastest growing, and like others in the Global South has moved from offering entrepreneurial capital to everyday liquidity, and even disaster relief. In this Viewpoint, however, we argue that the promotion of microfinance as market-based relief and recovery…
Seeing like the stateless: Documentation and the mobilities of liminal citizenship in Cambodia
Modern slavery, environmental degradation and climate change: Fisheries, field, forests and factories
In this commentary paper, the current state of research on the tightly connected and bi-directional relationships among modern slavery, environmental degradation and climate change is critically assessed and reviewed. An emerging branch of research has begun to conceptualize linkages between slavery and environmental change. Responding to a gap in the extant literature, this paper synthesizes and makes sense of this emerging research base and pro…
The Subjective Climate Migrant: Climate Perceptions, Their Determinants, and Relationship to Migration in Cambodia
This article examines the factors shaping the perception of climate change and the relationship between climate change perception and migration. Drawing on a 691-case survey of climate perceptions in Cambodia, it explores three dimensions of climate change perception. The first is the relationship of climate change perceptions to space, geography, and scale. Second is the influence of livelihoods to climate change perceptions, and third is the re…
Depleted by Debt: “Green” Microfinance, Over‐Indebtedness , and Social Reproduction in Climate‐Vulnerable Cambodia
The operations of microfinance are exalted in mainstream development thinking as a key means of supporting smallholder farmers facing growing crises of agricultural productivity in the context of daily, ongoing, and often slow‐onset climate disasters. Microfinance products and services are claimed to enhance coping and adaptative capacity by facilitating both risk recovery and reduction. Challenging the status quo, this paper brings together orig…
Multi-scalar inequality: Structured mobility and the narrative construction of scale in translocal Cambodia
Debt‐Bonded Brick Kiln Workers and Their Intent to Return: Towards a Labour Geography of Smallholder Farming Persistence in Cambodia
Despite the increasing preponderance of non‐farm work in Cambodia, labour migrants across a range of working conditions remain linked to their rural homesteads through durable financial and social arrangements. This article explores this phenomenon through the case of debt‐bonded brick kiln workers in Phnom Penh, formerly smallholder farmers in villages. Drawing on the field of labour geography, the article first examines the process by which lab…
Diffuse Drivers of Modern Slavery: From Microfinance to Unfree Labour in Cambodia
Over the past two decades, the global issue of modern slavery has become increasingly prominent within development thinking and practice. Efforts to address it largely focus on criminal prosecutions of immediate 'perpetrators', for instance those who are direct employers or middlemen. This article adds to a growing call from critical scholars to look to the structural drivers of such highly exploitative labour relations. Drawing on an unfree labo…
For a few dollars more: Towards a translocal mobilities of labour activism in Cambodia
Discardscapes of fashion: Commodity biography, patch geographies, and preconsumer garment waste in Cambodia
This paper advances existing research on both the geographies of fashion and the geographies of waste, utilising their shared interests in commodity biography. Empirically, it documents the use of textile waste from export-oriented garment factories in the peri-urban areas of Phnom Penh, Cambodia as fuel for nearby brick-kilns supplying the city’s booming construction sector. Interviews and documentary photography present the forms of living, lab…
Mother, grandmother, migrant: Elder translocality and the renegotiation of household roles in Cambodia
This paper explores the participation of elder members of Cambodian households in translocal livelihoods. Based on linked, rural-urban fieldwork rooted in a Phnom Penh garment worker enclave, it highlights three aspects of elder translocality in Cambodia. First, it shows that the logistics of older people's migrations are not predicated directly on physical mobility or lifecycle, as often assumed in the literature, but that these are merely two a…
Wakeful Geographies, Wakeful Bodies: Day and Nighttime Rhythms of Indebted Life and Capitalist Enclosure in Cambodia
For a discipline so oriented around the study of wakeful geographies, the lack of direct conceptual engagement with the notion of wakefulness-a cognitive state in which the mind is conscious of, and responsive to, the external world-is all-the-more remarkable. In this article we advance geography by probing and revealing the links that exist between wakefulness and indebted life under capitalism. We show how villagers in rural Cambodia experience…
Globalized Climate Precarity: Environmental Degradation, Disasters, and the International Brick Trade
Climate-linked disasters result when natural hazards meet socioeconomic precarity. Recognizing this, scholarship in recent years has emphasized how the precarity that turns climate-linked hazards into disasters is produced within the same global political economy that enables climate change. Nevertheless, despite growing interest in the ways in which the dynamics of global economic history shapes contemporary hazard vulnerability, less attention …
Mobilising hydrosocial power: Climate perception, migration and the small scale geography of water in Cambodia
As successive reports have predicted tens or even hundreds of millions of people displaced by climate change in the coming decades, the politics of climate migration has moved to the forefront of contemporary public discourse. In particular, those least able to adapt and most vulnerable to exploitation have garnered media and policy attention. Nevertheless, analysis of this phenomenon is inhibited by the large scale, predominantly unidirectional …
A viscous cycle: Low motility amongst Phnom Penh's highly mobile cyclo riders
This paper uses the concept of viscosity to highlight how structural impediments to movement affect not only populations and individuals characterised by low (or no) mobility but also highly mobile groups. Using the ‘cyclo’ riding paratransit workers of Phnom Penh as a lens, it is suggested here that groups of this sort are trapped in high-mobility cycles by a combination of structural factors and the discourse of their livelihoods. Specifically,…
Mobile inequality: Remittances and social network centrality in Cambodian migrant livelihoods
This article uses evidence from Cambodia to explore the role of remittances in replicating rural inequalities in urban areas. In doing so, it uses a mixed methodology, incorporating social network analysis, household surveys and qualitative interviews, to highlight the role of familial remittance commitments in determining urban migrant livelihoods via their influence on both social and financial resources. It argues that those migrants who are c…
Love in the Time of Nokia: Cultural Change as Compromise in a Cambodian Migrant Enclave
By investigating the social development of a migrant enclave in the context of rapid economic development and circular migration, this paper builds upon recent work emphasising the co-production of place by migrants and their hosts. In doing so, it introduces a longitudinal element to the analysis, highlighting that place in migrant enclaves is shaped by the interaction of not two forces – home and the host environment – but three: home, the non-…
Trading disaster: Containers and container thinking in the production of climate precarity
This paper examines how global trade shapes and intensifies disasters. Juxtaposing three basic, everyday consumer goods – a t‐shirt, a brick, and a tea bag – with disasters manifesting in their respective global supply chains, it highlights how climate change, local environmental degradation, and carbon emissions are dynamically shaped by consumption. Analysis of data collected in South and Southeast Asia reveals that local environmental degradat…
A Life in Motion: Exploring Auto/Biographical Exchanges by 'Walking With' Nelson Sullivan
In this article, we combine a number of related elements - YouTube films, autobiographical methods, diaries, letters, and walking - to explore the sociological value of the films of Nelson Sullivan (1948-1989). Sullivan was a film maker who documented New York, and elsewhere, in the mid-late 1980s; however, the films are 'vlogger style' and offer richly detailed, relational, and dialogical accounts of the ever-changing figurations between Nelson …
Geographies of labour in a changing climate
Climate change has profound implications for the geography of work. As the papers in this special section aim to show, changes to the climate – both long and short term – are not experienced directly but through the lens of working life. Those experiencing climate change are not atomistic entities, but connected agents, deeply embedded within global systems: as market traders or factory workers; rural farmers or civil servants. The changing clima…
The spirit in the machine: Towards a spiritual geography of debt bondage and labour (im)mobility in Cambodian brick kilns
This paper draws on evidence from debt bonded brick workers in Cambodia to explore how animism and formal religion are articulated to retain workers in dangerous and difficult conditions. The paper shows first how factory labourers, owners, and local religious figures actively articulate spiritual beliefs by legitimising workers’ confinement to the kiln through moral recourse to Buddhist notions of merit, character, and destiny. Secondly, it show…
Skeletons, dragons and the ‘climate war’: Geography's colonial legacy and the uneven landscape of environmental knowledge
As climate change becomes more central to geographers' thinking, climate geography as a field is developing a greater sense of self‐awareness. Whilst welcome, the historical legacy of geographic engagement with the climate brings both challenges and opportunities. As a discipline whose founding principle was to interrogate the nexus of the environmental – as well as a field with both appetite and aptitude for a radical interdisciplinarity – clima…
Strategic environmental ignorance: Antipolitical knowledge gaps from drought measurement to adaptation in Cambodia
In shaping environmental policy, knowledge is power. Yet the opposite is also true. Control over the absence of knowledge facilitates certain policy outcomes being deflected, obscured, or magnified in a way that furthers political, personal, or institutional ends. Applying previous work on ignorance studies and agnotology to the development of Cambodian drought policy, the paper demonstrates how data gaps, restrictions on data sharing, and obstac…
Wheels within Wheels: Poverty, Power and Patronage in the Cambodian Migration System
This article presents evidence for an adjusted and refocused systems theory of labour migration in Cambodia. Specifically, it seeks to highlight first, how migration in Cambodia may be understood as a multi-scalar phenomenon characterised by pragmatism and flexibility; secondly, it emphasises the undergirding role of traditional rural norms in shaping and mediating the systematic process of labour movement; and finally, it presents evidence conce…
The Village of the Damned? Myths and Realities of Structured Begging Behaviour in and Around Phnom Penh
This paper concerns the nature of structured begging migration in Phnom Penh, as well as its impact and meaning in sender communities. It interrogates a popular myth known throughout Cambodia concerning the supernatural motivation of ‘rich’ beggars, arguing that its prevalence reflects the growing incidence of structured, circular migration based around alms seeking in the capital. In doing so, it seeks to bridge the lacuna between the literature…
Mobile inequality: Remittances and social network centrality in Cambodian migrant livelihoods
This article uses evidence from Cambodia to explore the role of remittances in replicating rural inequalities in urban areas. In doing so, it uses a mixed methodology, incorporating social network analysis, household surveys and qualitative interviews, to highlight the role of familial remittance commitments in determining urban migrant livelihoods via their influence on both social and financial resources. It argues that those migrants who are c…
Love in the Time of Nokia: Cultural Change as Compromise in a Cambodian Migrant Enclave
By investigating the social development of a migrant enclave in the context of rapid economic development and circular migration, this paper builds upon recent work emphasising the co-production of place by migrants and their hosts. In doing so, it introduces a longitudinal element to the analysis, highlighting that place in migrant enclaves is shaped by the interaction of not two forces – home and the host environment – but three: home, the non-…
After the exodus: Exploring migrant attitudes to documentation, brokerage and employment following the 2014 mass withdrawal of Cambodian workers from Thailand
This paper uses the exodus of Cambodian migrant workers from Thailand in June 2014 as a focal point around which to explore Cambodian migrant attitudes towards the systems of documentation and brokerage that influence their movement. From the perspective of Cambodian returnees and their families, it builds on recent work exploring narratives of brokerage by demonstrating how documentation itself — and by extension the legality of migration — is v…
Multi-scalar inequality: Structured mobility and the narrative construction of scale in translocal Cambodia
A viscous cycle: Low motility amongst Phnom Penh's highly mobile cyclo riders
This paper uses the concept of viscosity to highlight how structural impediments to movement affect not only populations and individuals characterised by low (or no) mobility but also highly mobile groups. Using the ‘cyclo’ riding paratransit workers of Phnom Penh as a lens, it is suggested here that groups of this sort are trapped in high-mobility cycles by a combination of structural factors and the discourse of their livelihoods. Specifically,…
Mother, grandmother, migrant: Elder translocality and the renegotiation of household roles in Cambodia
This paper explores the participation of elder members of Cambodian households in translocal livelihoods. Based on linked, rural-urban fieldwork rooted in a Phnom Penh garment worker enclave, it highlights three aspects of elder translocality in Cambodia. First, it shows that the logistics of older people's migrations are not predicated directly on physical mobility or lifecycle, as often assumed in the literature, but that these are merely two a…
Structuring the emotional landscape of climate change migration: Towards climate mobilities in geography
The literature on climate migration is increasingly concerned with linking the natural-environmental and socio-cultural dimensions of risk response. However, the epistemological disjuncture between ‘objective’ and subjective accounts of the environment is an impediment. In particular, despite clear evidence of mutual relevance, work on the emotional landscape of climate change has remained separate from more systematic analyses. Aiming to resolve…
For a few dollars more: Towards a translocal mobilities of labour activism in Cambodia
Seeing like the stateless: Documentation and the mobilities of liminal citizenship in Cambodia
Debt‐Bonded Brick Kiln Workers and Their Intent to Return: Towards a Labour Geography of Smallholder Farming Persistence in Cambodia
Despite the increasing preponderance of non‐farm work in Cambodia, labour migrants across a range of working conditions remain linked to their rural homesteads through durable financial and social arrangements. This article explores this phenomenon through the case of debt‐bonded brick kiln workers in Phnom Penh, formerly smallholder farmers in villages. Drawing on the field of labour geography, the article first examines the process by which lab…
Mobilising hydrosocial power: Climate perception, migration and the small scale geography of water in Cambodia
As successive reports have predicted tens or even hundreds of millions of people displaced by climate change in the coming decades, the politics of climate migration has moved to the forefront of contemporary public discourse. In particular, those least able to adapt and most vulnerable to exploitation have garnered media and policy attention. Nevertheless, analysis of this phenomenon is inhibited by the large scale, predominantly unidirectional …
Giving as a total social phenomenon: Towards a human geography of reciprocity
This paper explores how small group sharing practices contribute to wider community hierarchies. Using a combination of qualitative, quantitative and network data, the paper shows how small group reciprocal practices overlap to generate key nodes within community scale networks, creating hierarchies and information inequalities in each site. Thus, the paper aims to draw closer conceptual linkages between close knit, "bonding" relationships, livel…
Climate change adaptation and precarity across the rural-urban divide in Cambodia: Towards a 'climate precarity' approach
An emerging body of work has critiqued the concept of climate adaptation, highlighting the structural constraints impeding marginalised communities across the Global South from being able to adapt. This article builds on such work through analysis of debt-bonded brick workers in Cambodia, formerly small farmers. It argues that the detrimental impacts of climate change experienced by farmers-turned-workers across the rural - urban divide is due to…
Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality
This book sets out to answer a question of global importance: how does inequality persist in our increasingly mobile world? It is a contentious problem. From Barack Obama to Pope Francis, inequality is often referred to as the greatest threat to our democracy, society and economy. Yet in an era some call the ‘age of migration’, opportunity has apparently never been more accessible. Long and short distance transport—from motorbikes to aeroplanes—a…
Compounding crises of social reproduction: Microfinance, over-indebtedness and the Covid-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit at a time when microfinance is at its historical peak, with an estimated 139 million microfinance customers globally. Cambodia's microfinance sector is one of the fastest growing, and like others in the Global South has moved from offering entrepreneurial capital to everyday liquidity, and even disaster relief. In this Viewpoint, however, we argue that the promotion of microfinance as market-based relief and recovery…
The spirit in the machine: Towards a spiritual geography of debt bondage and labour (im)mobility in Cambodian brick kilns
This paper draws on evidence from debt bonded brick workers in Cambodia to explore how animism and formal religion are articulated to retain workers in dangerous and difficult conditions. The paper shows first how factory labourers, owners, and local religious figures actively articulate spiritual beliefs by legitimising workers’ confinement to the kiln through moral recourse to Buddhist notions of merit, character, and destiny. Secondly, it show…
Debt, (Un)Freedom, and Development: Lessons from contemporary Asia
Geographies of labour in a changing climate
Climate change has profound implications for the geography of work. As the papers in this special section aim to show, changes to the climate – both long and short term – are not experienced directly but through the lens of working life. Those experiencing climate change are not atomistic entities, but connected agents, deeply embedded within global systems: as market traders or factory workers; rural farmers or civil servants. The changing clima…
The Subjective Climate Migrant: Climate Perceptions, Their Determinants, and Relationship to Migration in Cambodia
This article examines the factors shaping the perception of climate change and the relationship between climate change perception and migration. Drawing on a 691-case survey of climate perceptions in Cambodia, it explores three dimensions of climate change perception. The first is the relationship of climate change perceptions to space, geography, and scale. Second is the influence of livelihoods to climate change perceptions, and third is the re…
Modern slavery, environmental degradation and climate change: Fisheries, field, forests and factories
In this commentary paper, the current state of research on the tightly connected and bi-directional relationships among modern slavery, environmental degradation and climate change is critically assessed and reviewed. An emerging branch of research has begun to conceptualize linkages between slavery and environmental change. Responding to a gap in the extant literature, this paper synthesizes and makes sense of this emerging research base and pro…
Diffuse Drivers of Modern Slavery: From Microfinance to Unfree Labour in Cambodia
Over the past two decades, the global issue of modern slavery has become increasingly prominent within development thinking and practice. Efforts to address it largely focus on criminal prosecutions of immediate 'perpetrators', for instance those who are direct employers or middlemen. This article adds to a growing call from critical scholars to look to the structural drivers of such highly exploitative labour relations. Drawing on an unfree labo…
From Nottinghamshire to Notting Hill: Contemporary Lessons from Pearl Jephcott’s Ethnographies of ‘Troubled Areas’
The work of largely forgotten sociological researcher Pearl Jephcott is increasingly being recognised for its methodological complexity and innovation, and community-orientated approach. Here we revisit two of Jephcott’s lesser-known works. Yet again both working around issues that attracted great sociological interest in the 1950s and 1960s but were in many ways pioneered by Jephcott. The authors begin by exploring her study of youth delinquency…
Geographies of ruralisation or ruralities? The death and life of a category
The rural sphere has suffered from underrepresentation in recent years in part due to growing interest in the urban. A perhaps equally important aspect of the decline has been the troubling of the spatial boundaries that define the rural and urban among scholars of mobilities and translocality. Exploring the decline of the rural in relation to these literary works, this commentary interrogates current geographical thinking on spatial categories, …
Sociology (28 works) · Geography (23 works) · Political science (23 works) · Economics (16 works) · Cambodian History and Society (15 works) · Climate change (15 works) · Social science (12 works) · Economic geography (10 works) · Agriculture (9 works) · Engineering (9 works)