Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

Emerging debates on the contemporary reconfigurations of work question previous understandings of the relationships among and between waged, unwaged, and reproductive labour, situated processes of value formation and/or enclosure, and the constitution and limits of contemporary capitalism. Taking Cindi Katz's notion of countertopographies and Gillian Hart's notion of relational comparison as inspirations, this Symposium draws attention to new and existing conceptual frames and modes of analysis to situate contemporary permutations of work within the shifting dynamics of uneven development in specific state, local, and institutional contexts. This Introduction summarises the interrelated and overlapping contributions that papers in this Symposium offer methodologically, analytically, and politically. The open-ended aspiration that emerges from these contributions is that close attention to heterogeneous formations of work outside the wage might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the co-optation and enclosure of people's creative energies, and move toward realising the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest.     

Coloniality as a Barrier to Climate Action: Hierarchies of Power in a Coal-Based Economy

South Africa has a coal-based energy system and extractive economy, largely responsible for its high emission levels relative to countries with similar GDP. This extractive, coal-based economy began during British colonisation and today shows few signs of transitioning rapidly to limit climate change. This paper interrogates the role of coloniality in climate delay, given that colonisation is responsible for establishing fossil fuel dependence in South Africa. Combining theory on decolonisation, specifically colonial hierarchies of power, with a critical discourse analysis, this research uses interview and policy data to show how colonial power hierarchies can lead to climate delay in South Africa, through normalising emissions intensive development and silencing alternatives. In doing so, it highlights the need to recognise the colonial foundations of climate change and the potential for a coalition between decolonisation and climate action to motivate for radical change both in South Africa and at a global level.     

COMPOSITIONAL CHARACTERIZATION OF FRENCH LIMESTONE: A NEW TOOL FOR ART HISTORIANS*

Limestone from quarries known to medieval craftsmen and from the monuments they built and embellished, as well as from carvings now in museum collections, has been characterized by neutron activation analysis. Specimens from 38 quarries in the Lutetian and Jurassic limestone formations of France and from sculptures in American and French museums have been tested, and the results have been compiled in a data base to which art historians may refer when attempting to determine provenance for sculptures. Multivariate statistical analysis of concentration data shows stone from a particular quarry in the Paris basin to be compositionally homogeneous and distinguishable from other quarries in the same formation. The same approach to data related to quarries near the Burgundian abbey of Cluny finds general agreement between classifications based on compositional and on petrographic data, but the number of samples available for analysis at the time of writing was insufficient to achieve the finer distinctions reported for the Paris basin.     

Weighted Spatial Adaptive Filtering: Monte Carlo Studies and Application to Illicit Drug Market Modeling

This paper introduces a pattern recognizer, similar to weighting schemes used in combining time series forecasts, for use in spatial adaptive filtering applied to estimating multivariate cross-sectional models. The pattern recognizer enhances the ability to automatically detect and estimate parameters with discontinuous or sharp gradient changes over geographic contexts. Results from Monte Carlo studies suggest that the weighted spatial adaptive filter is at least as accurate as the unweighted filter for cases having smoothly changing parameters, but superior for cases having discontinuous, step-jump parameters. A case study on illicit drug-market activities using census tract-level data from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, further illustrates the advantages of the weighted filter.     

Contextualizing Welfare's Work Disincentive: The Case of Female-headed Family Poverty

The conventional model of the relationship between welfare incentives and poverty rates holds that welfare payments produce an income-enhancement effect that removes families from poverty until some threshold. Beyond this point increased payments engender a work-disincentive effect resulting in increased rates of poverty. We challenge the model's assumption that poverty levels are a simple and spatially invariant response to welfare incentives, contending instead that local employment conditions may substantially alter the relation. Our reformulation of the conventional modeling approach is based on the expansion method. Specifically, we extend the model to include the effects of local labor-market conditions on the response of poverty levels to welfare incentives. In contesting the invariance assumption, the expansion method allows us to determine where and in what contexts welfare is “work discouraging.” The empirical analysis, which is undertaken at the county level, indicates that welfare payments vary in their influence on poverty rates across different employment contexts. A national map portraying this parameter instability demonstrates that female-family poverty rates are most responsive to welfare assistance in the rural South and least responsive in the metropolitan Northeast. Finally, we examine two sharply contrasting locales to illustrate how poverty is governed by specific employment and welfare characteristics.     

Policy Gridlock in Waste Management

Current federal hazardous and low-level radioactive waste management policies (under conjoint federalism) fail to balance national concerns for consistency with state concerns for equity, discretion, and adequate resources. Congress should expand conjoint federalism to permit states to charge differential fees on imported hazardous waste as it does for low-level radioactive waste. For low-level radioactive waste, clarification of the "take title" issue makes the present framework for state discretion implementable, given sufficient time.