THE INTERPLAY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE: PLAY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LATE CAPITALISM

Practitioners of the performance form “InterPlay” utilize dance, storytelling and song to build community and generate social change. I elucidate how this community of practitioners conceptualizes “social change.” I argue that the InterPlay social movement organizes around the application of play to performances of self in everyday life. I explore how the InterPlay non-profit corporation, Body Wisdom Inc., employs this technique to address racial justice in its organizational practices. I also examine how practitioners understand their use of this performance play in places of work, concluding that—even in these endeavors—they see social change as a process immanent to both individual people and the systems they create, not as the intervention of an autonomous external power. Ultimately, I argue that, within late capitalism, play should no longer be conceptualized as an activity separate from everyday sociality but as an immanent process of change constitutive of a socioaesthetic domain.

ESSAYS IN ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT AND TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

This dissertation studies technological change in the context of energy and environmental economics. Technology plays a key role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector. Chapter 1 estimates a structural model of the car industry that allows for endogenous product characteristics to investigate how gasoline taxes, R&D subsidies and competition affect fuel efficiency and vehicle prices in the medium-run, both through car-makers' decisions to adopt technologies and through their investments in knowledge capital. I use technology adoption and automotive patents data for 1986-2006 to estimate this model. I show that 92% of fuel efficiency improvements between 1986 and 2006 were driven by technology adoption, while the role of knowledge capital is largely to reduce the marginal production costs of fuel-efficient cars. A counterfactual predicts that an additional $1/gallon gasoline tax in 2006 would have increased the technology adoption rate, and raised average fuel efficiency by 0.47 miles/gallon, twice the annual fuel efficiency improvement in 2003-2006. An R&D subsidy that would reduce the marginal cost of knowledge capital by 25% in 2006 would have raised investment in knowledge capital. This subsidy would have raised fuel efficiency only by 0.06 miles/gallon in 2006, but would have increased variable profits by $2.3 billion over all firms that year. Passenger vehicle fuel economy standards in the United States will require substantial improvements in new vehicle fuel economy over the next decade. Economic theory suggests that vehicle manufacturers adopt greater fuel-saving technologies for vehicles with larger market size. Chapter 2 documents a strong connection between market size, measured by sales, and technology adoption. Using variation consumer demographics and purchasing pattern to account for the endogeneity of market size, we find that a 10 percent increase in market size raises vehicle fuel efficiency by 0.3 percent, as compared to a mean improvement of 1.4 percent per year over 1997-2013. Historically, fuel price and demographic-driven market size changes have had large effects on technology adoption. Furthermore, fuel taxes would induce firms to adopt fuel-saving technologies on their most efficient cars, thereby polarizing the fuel efficiency distribution of the new vehicle fleet.

RISKS TO FOOD AVAILABILITY AND ACCESS FROM CLIMATE POLICIES: AN INTEGRATED ASSESSMENT OF REGIONAL FOOD AVAILABILITY AND ACCESS WITH ALTERNATIVE CLIMATE MITIGATION STRATEGIES TO 2050

Although mitigating GHG emissions is necessary to reduce the overall negative climate change impacts on crop yields and agricultural production, certain mitigation measures may generate unintended consequences to food availability and access due to land use competition and economic burden of mitigation. Prior studies have examined the co-impacts on food availability and global producer prices caused by alternative climate policies. More recent studies have looked at the reduction in total caloric intake driven by both changing income and changing food prices under one specific climate policy. However, due to inelastic calorie demand, consumers’ well-being are likely further reduced by increased food expenditures. Built upon existing literature, my dissertation explores how alternative climate policy designs might adversely affect both caloric intake and staple food budget share to 2050, by using the Global Change Assessment Model (GCAM) and a post-estimated metric of food availability and access (FAA). My dissertation first develop a set of new metrics and methods to explore new perspectives of food availability and access under new conditions. The FAA metric consists of two components, the fraction of GDP per capita spent on five categories of staple food and total caloric intake relative to a reference level. By testing the metric against alternate expectations of the future, it shows consistent results with previous studies that economic growth dominates the improvement of FAA. As we increase our ambition to achieve stringent climate targets, two policy conditions tend to have large impacts on FAA driven by competing land use and increasing food prices. Strict conservation policies leave the competition between bioenergy and agriculture production on existing commercial land, while pricing terrestrial carbon encourages large-scale afforestation. To avoid unintended outcomes to food availability and access for the poor, pricing land emissions in frontier forests has the advantage of selecting more productive land for agricultural activities compared to the full conservation approach, but the land carbon price should not be linked to the price of energy system emissions. These results are highly relevant to effective policy-making to reduce land use change emissions, such as the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD).

ANALYSIS OF MACROINVERTEBRATE COMMUNITIES IN SEASONAL WETLANDS THROUGH TIME, ACROSS SPACE, AND USING SPECIES TRAITS

Restoration of natural wetlands may be informed by macroinvertebrate community composition. Macroinvertebrate communities of wetlands are influenced by environmental characteristics such as vegetation, soil, hydrology, land use, and isolation. This dissertation explores multiple approaches to the assessment of wetland macroinvertebrate community composition, and demonstrates how these approaches can provide complementary insights into the community ecology of aquatic macroinvertebrates. Specifically, this work focuses on macroinvertebrates of Delmarva Bays, isolated seasonal wetlands found on Maryland’s eastern shore. A comparison of macroinvertebrate community change over a nine years in a restored wetland complex indicated that the macroinvertebrate community of a rehabilitated wetlands more rapidly approximated the community of a reference site than did a newly created wetland. The recovery of a natural macroinvertebrate community in the rehabilitated wetland indicated that wetland rehabilitation should be prioritized over wetland creation and long-term monitoring may be needed to evaluate restoration success. This study also indicated that characteristics of wetland vegetation reflected community composition. The connection between wetland vegetation and macroinvertebrate community composition led to a regional assessment of predaceous diving beetle (Coleoptera: Dytiscidae) community composition in 20 seasonal wetlands, half with and half without sphagnum moss (Sphagnum spp.). Species-level identifications indicated that wetlands with sphagnum support unique and diverse assemblages of beetles. These patterns suggest that sphagnum wetlands provide habitat that supports biodiversity on the Delmarva Peninsula. To compare traits of co-occurring beetles, mandible morphology and temporal and spatial variation were measured between three species of predaceous diving beetles. Based on mandible architecture, all species may consume similarly sized prey, but prey characteristics likely differ in terms of piercing force required for successful capture and consumption. Therefore, different assemblages of aquatic beetles may have different effects on macroinvertebrate community structure. Integrating community-level and species-level data strengthens the association between individual organisms and their ecological role. Effective restoration of imperiled wetlands benefits from this integration, as it informs the management practices that both preserve biodiversity and promote ecosystem services.