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Language documentation of the American Sign Language (ASL) communities is essential to preserve and share our language use and interaction, something we cherish. Yet there is no conventionalized written system that can be used, instead we've been using video. Currently these videos are mostly not accessible in a way we can search the contents for language expressions. The ASL Signbank, an empirical-based resource-driven database, labels ASL use in transcripts time-aligned to ASL videos along with a set of annotation conventions to make the data machine-readable. ASL Signbank is a cloud-based annotation tool built over twenty years from the models of extant signbanks and their organizing principles. To create a database requires many choices and ongoing labor which is detailed in this Element - from what ASL Signbank is to why it exists and how to use it. This Element is also a reflection on these choices.
This Element focuses on contemporary forms of nativism (belief in innateness), which mostly concern the existence of domain-specific learning mechanisms with innate structure and content. After sketching some innate capacities that are widely believed to be shared with other animals, the Element thereafter discusses a number of (alleged) distinctively-human ones. One concerns a faculty of language, another our capacity for representing the mental states of others (and derivatively, ourselves). It then turns to discuss some proposed innate adaptations that support culture. These include a number of learning biases, as well as affective learning mechanisms that enable swift acquisition of cultural values. The final two sections then discuss 'tribal psychology.' This may include an innate disposition to stereotype social groups as well as innate 'tribal' motivations (both positive and negative). The over-arching thesis of the Element is that human nature might best be thought of as culture-enabling nature.
Traditionally, Christians have viewed unbelief as resulting from moral and/or cognitive shortcomings. However, a recent proposal such as John Schellenberg's 'divine hiddenness argument' for atheism has supported the idea that there is no-fault unbelief. In this Element, the author draws on important insights from medieval Christian thought to argue that both believers and non-believers should stop blaming each other based on mere evidence. Believers may recognise that no-fault unbelief can, in a sense, apply to them, too. They may find it perplexing that they neither believe nor achieve communion with God as much as they would like. Proponents of no-fault unbelief might focus on achieving communion with God rather than solely worrying about absolving themselves of blame. Ultimately, believers and non-believers alike might promote spiritual progress by setting aside the primacy of evidence and committing themselves to God and the good.
In the vital traditions of women of color feminisms, queer of color critique, and aligned projects disidentified from majoritarian worlds, this Element focuses attention on how we continue to work in and with the attenuating conditions of academic life.There is, it suggests, hope to be found, nurtured, and elicited amid the difficulties of the present. This Element does not romanticize or assign nobility or moral purpose to teaching or to scholarly life more broadly. Rather, it elaborates an understanding of teaching as a name for how we go about building collectivities, sensibilities, and social formations organized by and around mutuality, reciprocity, and solidarity. This Element remembers the classroom to be any space dedicated to the work of collectively thinking hard, and one in which we rehearse the forms of relation, social being, and collegiality we wish to proliferate.
William Sancho was the son of Ignatius Sancho, one of the eighteenth century's most important Black Britons. In contrast to his father, however, William's life has never been fully explored. This Element builds a new evidential trail to uncover a multifaceted career that saw the younger Sancho undertake an apprenticeship and become a bookseller, rate-paying citizen and well-connected man about town. Sancho also contributed to the early vaccination movement and the campaign against slavery. Remarkable as elements of it were, Sancho's story makes sound historical sense for someone so deeply embedded within the country's burgeoning entrepreneurial, literate, male-dominated, metropolitan and imperially-focused public sphere. Sancho was a Black man who lived a distinctly 'British' life: his importance stands on its own terms, but also alters our perspectives of what these two historical labels have traditionally implied, and the experiences that were possible as part of them.
This Element investigates how playwrights can employ text-based strategies to facilitate audience participation in performance. It looks to contemporary discourse in the field of applied theatre to suggest principles the creator of a participatory work may employ to support the creation of a performance text which invites, and is responsive to, contributions from the audience. This Element offers analysis of works by playwrights Tim Crouch, Nassim Soleimanpour, Hannah Jane Walker and Chris Thorpe, all of whom experiment with text-based modalities to position the audience as co-creators in performance. It offers the insights gained from the author through their own experience of writing and staging a participatory performance. This Element draws upon ideas on care, relationality and affect to propose a care-centred model of playwriting which fosters an inclusive and accessible experience of co-creation in performance.
This Element provides a broad overview of autism spectrum disorder from early childhood through adolescence. The Element reviews high-impact areas of research relevant to young children, including the shifting diagnostic conceptualizations of autism, current best practices related to screening and diagnosis, our understanding of factors that increase the likelihood of receiving an autism diagnosis, the overlap between autism and other co-occurring conditions, and related contemporary approaches to supports and interventions for young children. The discussion of these topics addresses measurement of outcomes, reproducibility, and methodological rigor. By focusing on these methodological gaps and progress, future directions for research in each of these areas is highlighted.
This Element theorizes the emergence of the girl as the ideal subject of Western imperialist power. Feminist anti-imperialist scholars have long argued that imperialism operates through the global North's claim to be the savior of voiceless, victimized women and girls in the global South. However, during the global war on terrorism, the military and development organizations of the global North shifted their practices and rhetoric in response to the popularization of this feminist anti-imperialist critique. Focusing on this key historical shift, Theory of the Counterinsurgent Girl argues that hegemonic Western cultural and military strategies have moved away from 'saving' women to 'empowering' girls, in keeping with the neoliberal emphasis on individual resilience and agency. This Element traces the rise to dominance of the figure of the agential girl, analyzing how she has been incorporated into decision-making, securitizing, and policing operations as both a surveillance tool and a social justice goal.
Today's resurgence of global strife, polarization and neo-nationalism is unprecedented in intensity since the end of the Cold War. Against the backdrop of such dramatic changes, there is anxiety leading many to cling to certitudes that the world is made up of clear-cut divisions: developed versus undeveloped; democratic versus dictatorial; tolerant versus intolerant... Yet, when taking a long term view, and when delving into the vastness of geographical spaces, it becomes obvious that such beliefs are decoupled from reality. This work shows the relativity of these beliefs by examining an issue that has divided the West and China: Tolerance, particularly as reflected in state acts towards religion. It does so without wanting to expound opinions but rather to verify facts; without simplifying but rather to show complexity; and without judging but rather to comprehend.
Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) is a discipline concerned with designing interactions in sociotechnical systems to improve both system performance and human well-being. This Element introduces the core principles of HFE, tracing its development from multidisciplinary efforts to solve practical problems in military operations during the Second World War to its current application in healthcare improvement. The Element acknowledges the growing role of HFE in areas such as the design of the physical environment, medical device design, learning from patient safety incidents, and safety investigations. A critical reflection highlights persistent challenges, including conceptual ambiguity, structural and practical barriers to HFE integration, and the need both for a stronger evidence base and a compelling business case. The Element concludes by identifying future priorities for advancing HFE in healthcare, including continuing professional development and career pathways, embedding HFE in regulation and policy, and adopting evaluation approaches suited to complex systems. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element offers a critical exploration of institutional health communication in an era marked by information overload and uneven content quality. It examines how health institutions can navigate the challenges of false, misleading, and poor-quality health information while preserving public trust and scientific integrity. Drawing from disciplines such as health communication, behavioral science, media studies, and rhetoric, this Element promotes participatory models, transparent messaging, and critical health literacy. Through a series of thematic sections and practical examples, it addresses the role of science, politics, media, and digital influencers in shaping public understanding. Designed as both a conceptual guide and a strategic toolkit, this Element aims to support institutions in fostering informed, engaged, and resilient communities through communication that is clear, ethical, and responsive to the complexities of today's health discourse. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element advocates the Majlis Curriculum as a culturally responsible framework for teacher education in Arabia. Rather than treating culture as a supplementary means of transmitting local values or reducing it to language instruction, the Element conceptualizes culture as an epistemic and pedagogical foundation for teacher training. It extends the Arab-Islamic tripartite model of Tarbiya, Ta'lim, and Ta'dib by introducing Al-Ra'y as a fourth component of deliberative reasoning. The Majlis is theorized as an educational space that cultivates deliberation and civic responsibility in conversation with the liberal arts. This Element, therefore, positions culturally responsible pedagogy as a precondition for culturally responsive teaching. Intercultural engagement requires identifying and activating local epistemologies that align with the aims of liberal arts. The Element offers a contextual approach that preserves cultural continuity and enables teachers in Arabia to engage with international educational discourses. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element situates epistemic game theory at the intersection of decision theory, game theory, and interactive epistemology. It provides an overview and a critical assessment of some of the most classical results and contributions in the field: the epistemic characterization of Nash equilibrium, the epistemic interpretation of mixed actions, rationalizability in static games, and sub-game perfect equilibrium in dynamic games. The book furthermore discusses more recent contributions that highlight the importance of correlated beliefs in games, and as well as experimental and empirical findings on higher-order strategic reasoning.
Quantile models are widely used across the natural and social sciences to analyze heterogeneous phenomena that conventional mean-based approaches often obscure. Yet, despite their growing importance in many disciplines, their adoption in political science has remained comparatively limited, in part because the field still lacks an accessible introduction tailored to its substantive questions and empirical practices. This Element addresses that gap by showing how quantile models can expand the methodological repertoire of political science and deepen our understanding of political phenomena. Combining methodological innovation with practical guidance, this Element introduces quantile models for both continuous and discrete response variables and illustrates their use with real-world political examples. All empirical applications are accompanied by publicly available data, code, and software, making the Element a useful resource for both teaching and research. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Criminology has long examined the relationship between crime, place, and community dynamics, but has largely overlooked rural areas. Many rural communities possess features that typically protect against crime, like strong informal social controls and collective efficacy, but they also face threats to safety similar to those in urban areas, such as economic decline, poverty, substance abuse, and social isolation. Yet we know little about what shapes rural residents' perceptions of safety. This Element draws on interviews with over 100 young people in Appalachian Kentucky to explore the social determinants of safety in their communities. It examines the protective aspects of local culture, the impact of addiction and economic hardship, and how these issues expose a “dark side” of social cohesion whereby collective efficacy is undermined by stigma and shame. It concludes by exploring how youth and community institutions can help redefine safety, from a privilege to a fundamental human right.
At the turn of the twentieth century, operatic singing in the German-speaking world remained deeply influenced by the Italian tradition, which implied a lyrical vocal style that prioritised technical precision, tonal beauty, and expressive clarity. From the 1910s onward, composers increasingly and systematically explored vocal techniques that blurred the boundary between speech and song, referred to here as the 'hybrid voice'. These approaches emerged from a complex interplay of symbolic, aesthetic, political, and philosophical influences and reflect a search for more diverse and individualised modes of vocal expression. This Element examines the hybrid voice in four seminal works of German modernism: Alban Berg's Wozzeck, Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten, and Adriana Hölszky's Bremer Freiheit. By situating each work within its historical and stylistic context, it traces a broader musical trajectory in German opera from expressionism and new objectivity to the postwar avant-garde.
This Element explores how citizens understand general crime and violence against women, especially intimate partner violence (IPV). Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, this Element makes the case that cognitive heuristics and risk assessments, in particular, shape the way people see crime versus IPV. The central argument is that cognitive heuristics that generate risk perceptions help us understand why the public worries excessively about crime, with important political consequences, while downplaying IPV. This fosters distinct attitudes toward IPV and general crime. Accordingly, this Element sheds light on why victim-blaming is so prevalent in the context of IPV. Using original survey experiments from Brazil and Mexico, the study shows that respondents attribute more responsibility for prevention to the victim for IPV than for general crimes, display optimism bias with acquaintance victimization, and approve different types of policy remedies to deal with general crime and IPV.
This Element examines the tombstone for Andrew of Perugia (d. 1332?), the sole surviving object from the 14C Franciscan mission in China. The narrative begins in Zayton, where diverse groups brought to this maritime entrepot old antagonisms and new alliances. The discovery of Andrew's tombstone and that of other Christian monuments over the centuries, demonstrate how various Christian churches interacted with their host society from the eighth through the fourteenth centuries. Relying to the extent possible on words of the protagonists, this Element scrutinizes the Nestorian cross-and-lotus motif and questions prevailing interpretations about this quintessential Nestorian iconography and its presence on a Franciscan tombstone: the interreligious borrowing of art and symbolism, the mode through which ideas and traditions were transmitted, the function and purpose of adaptation, and the plausible contribution of local artisans to the creation of the earliest Christian art in China.
Written against the backdrop of ten years of visits and studies in 220 Gothic cathedrals, Gothic iconic local churches, and neo-Gothic cathedrals, this Element examines the idea of historical religious structures as 'hybrid media spaces' using grounded theory and communication and media approaches to capture the processes of communicating and erasing Christian processes of excommunicating in contemporary secular society. They show that at the current pace of societal conditions, cathedrals and iconic churches labeled as Gothic style are becoming the new platform for religious hybrid media practices and connections between religious and non-religious approaches.