More than a million fish bones have been analyzed from the faunal assemblages in shell middens that mark the location of ancestral Indigenous settlements on the shores of the central reaches of the Salish Sea. Salmon bones, which account for 38% of the identifiable fish remains, are most abundant close to the main migration route of Fraser River sockeye and pink salmon. Salmon bone abundance in the “Marpole” cultural phase from 2400 to 1200 cal BP varies in concert with activity levels at salmon-fishing locations upstream on the Thompson River, peaking in the interval of maximal local marine productivity from about 1650 to 1350 cal BP. Summed probability distributions (SPDs) derived from the radiocarbon catalogs of coastal sites either echo the Thompson River pattern or are contrapuntal. The concordant SPDs suggest that Salishan population dynamics on the sockeye migration route reflect the relative success of the salmon fishery. The contrapuntal patterns are restricted to bays and inlets off the main sockeye and pink salmon migration route and may reflect the movements of Salishan people responding to a dearth of salmon by resettling in locales with a less volatile resource base.

Spray drift and volatilization of the herbicide dicamba from agricultural uses is an area of significant study in recent years. While only the low-volatility formulations of dicamba have been approved for use in the United States in post-emergent dicamba tolerant (DT) cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) and soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.], a variety of other dicamba products that are not specifically low-volatility have been approved for decades and can be used as pre-emergent herbicides in certain crops, including soybean and cotton, and in early post-emergent corn applications. This study compared the volatility and spray drift deposition resulting from an approved use of dicamba on DT soybean, an approved dicamba use on corn (Zea mays L.), and an example of an unapproved use of dicamba on soybean all side-by-side in two locations. Results showed that the downwind spray drift deposition of dicamba was highest in the approved corn applications at both field locations due to medium droplet size and higher release height. The volatility of dicamba during the first sampling interval after application as measured by air concentrations was between 13 and 74 times higher for approved corn or unapproved soybean treatments at 1.5 m above the crop, compared to approved soybean at both study locations. Results from this study suggest that the low-volatility formulations and label measures in DT soybean and cotton uses are beneficial in keeping dicamba off-target movement potential relatively low.

Scholars have investigated the characteristics of volatile voters ever since the first voter surveys were carried out and they have paid specific attention to the role of political sophistication on vote switching. Nevertheless, the exact nature of this relationship is still unclear. With increasing volatility over the past decades this question has furthermore grown in relevance. Is the growing unpredictability of elections mostly driven by sophisticated voters making well‐considered choices or is the balance of power in the hands of unsophisticated ‘floating voters’? Several scholars have argued that even under conditions of increasing volatility switching is still mostly confined to changes to ideologically close parties. Most researchers, however, have used rather crude measures to investigate this ‘leap’ between parties. To advance research in this field, this article directly models the ideological distance bridged by volatile voters when investigating the link between political sophistication and volatility. This is done using Comparative Study of Electoral systems (CSES) data that encompass a broad sample of recent parliamentary elections worldwide. Results indicate that voters with an intermediate level of political knowledge are most likely to switch overall. When taking into account the ideological distance of party switching, however, the confining impact of political knowledge on the vote choices made is clearly dominant, resulting in a linear decrease of the distance bridged as voters become more knowledgeable.

For a number of decades now, scholars have been indicating that ties between citizens and parties are eroding. As a consequence, electoral behaviour has become more volatile and also more unpredictable. The consequences of this process of change on parties’ strategic behaviour have, however, received little attention. In this article, the impact of dealignment on parties’ strategic behaviour is examined, with the focus being on the extent to which parties are responsive to the mean voter. The expectation of dealignment allowing parties ‘to move around more freely’ leads to the hypothesis that parties are more responsive in a context of dealignment. The analyses provide evidence that is in line with this expectation. Ideological responsiveness is conditioned by the level of volatility in the electorate. The conclusion to draw from these results is that dealignment, which profoundly affects voters’ behaviour, leads parties to become more responsive to the mean voter.

The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well as socio-economic black-boxing (schemes that monopolize inherently non-scarce resources), so as to open our imagination to skills and tactics that would allow us to navigate the rich but volatile flows of social, political, and economic abundance.

This essay explores the meaning that volatility assumes in the Chinese stock market context. Drawing on discussions from ‘mom and pop’ online forums, it argues investors operate in a relational position with the Chinese state regulators that both sustain and threaten their market activities. Chinese stock markets are known to be the most volatile in the world. To face the state's arbitrary intervention in the market, investors must constantly juggle the options of either leaning on and trusting the regulators’ capacity to protect and rescue their stocks or engaging in risky margin trading and short-selling activities. This contradictory behavior is reflected in the popular self-mocking meme that keeps circulating in investors online forums, the one of the jiucai (meaning ‘garlic chives’). The investors often use it with irony to describe their own tendency to throw cash into the markets again and again, hoping to regain the money they lost in previous investments, never learning a lesson. Linking the financial with the biopolitical dimension, the essay takes the jiucai meme to show the extent to which volatility points to the production of new subjects whose resilience involves the adoption of practices of speculation to conjure a future for themselves that is reborn multiple times.

The term ‘volatility’ applies to changeability: both that which can be measured, such as temperatures and stock prices, and that which cannot be easily measured, such as affects and emotions. Quantitative financial volatility has typically been studied quite separately from art, culture, and everyday life. Randy Martin's work, which addressed the resonances between volatility in dance and finance, was a notable exception. Martin focused on derivatives, which played a critical role in the development of financialized capitalism, especially between 1973-2008. Arguably, however, derivatives are no longer the key drivers of volatility as a social and cultural logic. New assemblages of asset managers, rentiers, and online platforms - along with a pandemic, new banking crises, and ongoing climate emergency - are reshaping how volatility is produced and navigated. How might we rethink volatility in order to better grasp its changing logics? This introduction unpacks existing debates on volatility in finance, art, and culture, suggesting several directions in which new work in this area might depart from existing frameworks - some of which are pursued in this special issue. We focus on three broad lines of exploration: rethinking the intellectual histories of volatility; rethinking volatility across disparate post-2008 contexts; and imagining volatile futures through art practice.

This article explores the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of volatility and their implications for cultural analysis in a range of fields. From quantitative finance, it takes the notion of ‘delta-hedging’, the suspension or neutralization of directionality to get access to volatility, and applies this to qualitative areas such as surfing, dance, cinema, and language.

This article argues that there are parallels between developments in modern science and in art and culture, including the culture of finance, and that these developments can be tracked by a notion of volatility not just as change, but as how change itself has changed. Describing this paradigm shift requires a language that is precise but indeterminate, a language akin to metaphor, understood as figures of volatility. Three such figures are anamorphosis, anachronism, and catachresis. These figures are major instantiations of volatility, though they do not exhaust all the possibilities. What they indicate is not just that our frames of understanding have shifted, but that we are dealing with problematic, multiple, and overlapping frames: anamorphosis problematizes our experience of space, anachronism of time, and catachresis of language. These figures are not all in play at the same time. In literature, catachresis may be the dominant figure; in dance, anamorphosis; in ‘slow cinema’, anachronism. The aim is less to arrive at a set of defining characteristics than to follow a series of transformations across different cultural fields. Almost every field in our time is volatile each in its own way, and this has consequences for methodology. If figures are tools to think with, not to regulate thought, a necessary method would be to allow these figures to emerge from the material, not from a checklist. The question of volatility is arguably the key intellectual challenge of our time because it allows us to see deviation from a norm not just as an aberration, but as an indication that established norms are losing their normative value.

Damage to non–dicamba resistant (non-DR) soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merr.] has been frequent in geographies where dicamba-resistant (DR) soybean and cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) have been grown and sprayed with the herbicide in recent years. Off-target movement field trials were conducted in northwest Arkansas to determine the relationship between dicamba concentration in the air and the extent of symptomology on non-DR soybean. Additionally, the frequency and concentration of dicamba in air samples at two locations in eastern Arkansas and environmental conditions that impacted the detection of the herbicide in air samples were evaluated. Treatment applications included dicamba at 560 g ae ha−1 (1X rate), glyphosate at 860 g ae ha−1, and particle drift retardant at 1% v/v applied to 0.37-ha fields with varying degrees of vegetation. The relationship between dicamba concentration in air samples and non-DR soybean response to the herbicide was more predictive with visible injury (generalized R2 = 0.82) than height reduction (generalized R2 = 0.43). The predicted dicamba air concentration resulting in 10% injury to soybean was 1.60 ng m−3 d−1 for a single exposure. The predicted concentration from a single exposure to dicamba resulting in a 10% height reduction was 3.78 ng m−3 d−1. Dicamba was frequently detected in eastern Arkansas, and daily detections above 1.60 ng m−3 occurred 17 times in the period sampled. The maximum concentration of dicamba recorded was 7.96 ng m−3 d−1, while dicamba concentrations at Marianna and Keiser, AR, were ≥1 ng m−3 d−1 in six samples collected in 2020 and 22 samples in 2021. Dicamba was detected consistently in air samples collected, indicating high usage in the region and the potential for soybean damage over an extended period. More research is needed to quantify the plant absorption rate of volatile dicamba and to evaluate the impact of multiple exposures of gaseous dicamba on non-targeted plant species.