Going Nowhere Fast

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. * Jonathan Rigg, ASEAS UK Blog *
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. * Jonathan Rigg, Chair in Human Geography, University of Bristol *
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. * Rosa Yi, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore. *