Organised by Jennifer L. Tucker (University of New Mexico), Aman Luthra (George Washington University) and Christian Anderson (University of Washington, Bothell)

Forthcoming in Antipode 55(4) in July 2023, and available online now, this collection, “Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons”, originated in a series of conversations at the Annual Meetings of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) between 2017 and 2019, organised by Jennifer Tucker, Aman Luthra and Christian Anderson. Each paper in the Symposium interrogates contemporary permutations of work outside the wage within shifting dynamics of uneven development in a range of sectors, sites, and settings around the world. Methodologically inspired by critical approaches to comparison, each paper outlines connections across distinct locations, with most co-authored by two researchers who bring their ethnographic material into conversation, and across space and time.

The Symposium’s critical comparative approach demonstrates that, across contexts, precarious forms of work outside the wage intensify and mutate with contemporary capitalism’s depredations, made manifest in a heterogeneous range of formations that challenge common binary conceptions of formal/informal, paid/unpaid, inclusion/exclusion, inside/outside, and waste/value. Ultimately, Tucker, Luthra and Anderson’s introduction argues, and the assembled papers show, how close attention to this heterogeneity might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the cooptation and enclosure of people’s creative energies, and move toward the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest.

Symposium – Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons
by Jennifer L. Tucker, Aman Luthra and Christian Anderson

The Mixed Potential of Salvage Commoning: Crisis and Commoning Practices in Washington, DC and New York City
by Christian M. Anderson and Amanda Huron

Reproducing the Plot: Making Life in the Shadow of Premature Death
by Rachel Goffe

Navigating Wait Space in Uncertain Times: Young Women and Precarious Labour in Turkey
by Hilal Kara and Beverley Mullings

Of Market Vendors and Waste Collectors: Labour, Informality, and Aesthetics in the Era of World-Class City Making
by Aman Luthra and William Monteith

Seniors’ Long-Term Care in Canada: A Continuum of Soft to Brutal Privatisation
by Nicole Molinari and Geraldine Pratt