Laurie Parsons is Reader in Human Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and Principal Investigator of the projects The Disaster Trade: The Hidden Footprint of UK Imports and Investment Overseas and Hot Trends: How the Global Garment Industry Shapes Climate Vulnerability in Cambodia. 

In these and other projects, he explores the experience of climate change in the global economy, exposing the hidden environmental impacts of global production and unequal landscape of exposure to climate change impacts.

He was previously Co-Investigator of the project Blood Bricks: Untold Stories of Modern Slavery and Climate Change from Cambodia, which examined brick kiln work in Cambodia through the lens of the contested politics of climate change on socio-economic inequalities, patterns of work and mobilities. In 2020, Blood Bricks was awarded the Times Higher Education Prize for Research Project of the Year.

Overarchingly, Laurie's work seeks to explore how climate change is articulated through the social, political and economic systems within which we live. This is therefore work which highlights the subjectivities and inequalities which shape climate change impacts, channeling their worst impacts through the lens of pre-existing local and global precarities. 

His first book, Going Nowhere Fast: Inequality in the Age of Translocality, was published by Oxford University Press in August 2020 and subsequently shortlisted for the EuroSEAS 2021 Social Science book prize. An edited collection, entitled Climate Change in the Global Workplace was published with Routledge in 2021. 

Strongly committed to policy engagement, Laurie has conducted large-scale projects examining inequalities in Cambodia’s economic development for Transparency International, Plan International, Save the Children, CARE International, ActionAid, the IDRC and the Royal University of Phnom Penh, among others.