Going Nowhere Fast

Using data and insights from over ten years of field research in Cambodia this book explores how inequality persists in a hypermobile world.

I found the book novel not just in terms of the empirical material and the arguments that are developed, but also in terms of the tenor of its argumentation. It is a research monograph but reads, in places, almost like an op-ed piece ... We see here an attempt - largely successful, I should add - to draw the reader into the authors' field sites, the empirical material they generate, and the arguments they explore. They are intent on making these places, conditions and debates accessible and understandable, so that we - the reader - are more likely to care, albeit from a distance.

How can a development success story like Cambodia be shown to be both less and more than standard economic analyses pronounce? In this compelling book, Parsons and Lawreniuk draw on months of field work to explore the persistence of social immobility against the backdrop of heightened spatial mobility. They show that inequality is not one thing but many, produced through macroforces but experienced in the everyday, at once multiscalar and scaled differentially. More to the point, and unlike Dr Seuss' Little Cat Z, there is no 'Voom' to reach for in the grab bag of policy tricks.

Going Nowhere Fast by geographers Sabina Lawreniuk and Laurie Parsons is an important contribution to migration and development studies of Cambodia and wider Southeast Asia...This conceptualization distinguishes it from the larger literature on inequality and mobility. As such Going Nowhere Fast deserves a wide readership among scholars of Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

Dr Sabina Lawreniuk is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is currently engaged in an activist research project, collaborating with trade unions, employers, regulators, global brands, and other industry stakeholders in the Cambodian garment sector to examine inequalities in global supply chains and empower marginalised women workers. Dr Laurie Parsons is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is recipient of a recent Global Challenges funding award offered jointly by the Economic and Social Research Council and the UK's Department for International Development entitled 'Blood Bricks', examining the relationship between climate change, migration and modern slavery in Cambodian brick factories.