Dr Rorie Beswick-Parsons
School of Geography and Planning
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Full contact details
School of Geography and Planning
Geography and Planning Building
Winter Street
Sheffield
S3 7ND
- Profile
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Rorie gained a BA (Hons) degree in Geography from the University of Hull. This led to an ESRC funded Masters in Planning and Environment Research and PhD at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape (2013-2018).
- Research interests
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Rorie Parsons is a Geographer with a research focus that is concerned with issues of sustainability and understanding social change.
His recent research pays attention to two questions: (1) how consumer practices and patterning of everyday life change when accommodating alternative packaging systems; and (2) how business practices, technologies, and markets interact in processes of change (or resistance) in respect to packaging. His work approaches these from both a historical and contemporary standpoint through a mixture of research methodologies, most notably, ethnography, archival analysis, and secondary data research.
Prior to his current role, Rorie has contributed to several major multidisciplinary projects as a Post-Doctoral Research Associate, with a particular emphasis on exploring social and technical solutions to the challenges of plastics. These include Plastics: Redefining single-use (EPSRC), Many Happy Returns - Enabling reusable packaging systems (NERC), and Reducing plastic packaging and food waste through product innovation simulation (NERC). He is also currently a contributor to the Horizon Europe funded project, Business-driven systemic solutions for sustainable plastic packaging reuse schemes in mass market applications.
- Publications
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Journal articles
- Integrating behavioural, material and environmental science to inform the design and evaluation of a reuse system for takeaway food. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 209, 107815-107815.
- Understanding national variations in reusable packaging: Commercial drivers, regulatory factors, and provisioning systems. Geoforum, 145, 103844-103844.
- Combining insights from the environmental and behavioural sciences to understand what is required to make reusable packaging mainstream. Sustainable Production and Consumption.
- Understanding plastic packaging: The co-evolution of materials and society. Global Environmental Change, 65, 102166-102166.
- Design activism: catalysing communities of practice. Architectural Research Quarterly, 24(2), 100-116. View this article in WRRO
- ‘Resistance was futile!’ Cycling’s discourses of resistance to UK automobile modernism 1950–1970. Planning Perspectives, 33(2), 163-183.
- The role of plastic packaging in transforming food retailing. British Food Journal.
- Integrating behavioural, material and environmental science to inform the design and evaluation of a reuse system for takeaway food. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 209, 107815-107815.