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This Element attends to attention drawn away. That the Globe is a 'distracted' space is a sentiment common to both Hamlet's original audience and attendees at the reconstructed theatre on London's Bankside. But what role does distraction play in this modern performance space? What do attitudes to 'distraction' reveal about how this theatre space asks and invites us to pay attention? Drawing on scholarly research, artist experience, and audience behaviour, This Distracted Globe considers the disruptive, affective, phenomenological, and generative potential of distraction in contemporary performance at the Globe.
The widespread prevalence of economically, socially, and environmentally unsustainable practices in global value chains is a pressing international challenge. The way to improve systems and practices in the complex networks that characterize contemporary production processes is not clear cut. Finding solutions requires innovation. This Element examines the structures of garment value chains and explores how innovation related to sustainability is taking place in these chains. Furthermore, it identifies barriers and opportunities for innovations to break through and stimulate industry-wide change.
Digital technologies are reshaping the global economy and complicating cooperation over its governance. Innovations in technology and business propel a new, digitally-driven phase of globalization defined by the expansion of cross-border information flows that is provoking political conflict and policy discord. This Element argues that the activities of digital value chains (DVCs), the central economic actors in digital globalization, complicate international economic relations. DVC activities can erode individual privacy, shift tax burdens, and cement monopoly positions. These outcomes generate a new politics of globalization, and governments are responding with increasing restrictions on cross-border data flows. This monograph: 1) explains the new sources of political division stemming from digital globalization; 2) documents policy barriers to digital trade; 3) presents a framework to explain digital trade barriers across countries; and 4) assesses the prospects for international cooperation on digital governance, which requires countries move beyond coordinated liberalization and toward coordinated regulation.
This Element introduces Aristotle's doctrine of hylomorphism, which provides an account of substances in terms of their 'matter' and 'form', adapting and applying it to the interface between physics and biology. It begins by indicating some reasons for the current revival of hylomorphism and by suggesting a way of classifying the confusing array of hylomorphisms that have arisen. It argues that, in order for composite entities to have irreducible causal powers which make a difference to how nature unfolds, they must have substantial forms which transform their matter such that the powers of their physical parts are grounded in the composite entity as a whole. It suggests how a contemporary form of hylomorphism might contribute to the philosophy of biology by grounding the non-intentional form of teleology that features in the identity conditions of biological systems, affirming a real distinction between living organisms and heaps of matter. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The way we represent the world in thought and language is shot through with indeterminacy: we speak of red apples and yellow apples without thereby committing to any sharp cutoff between the application of the predicate 'red' and of the predicate 'yellow'. But can reality itself be indeterminate? In other words, can indeterminacy originate in the mind-independent world, and not only in our representations? If so, can the phenomenon also arise at the microscopic scale of fundamental physics? Section 1 of this Element provides a brief overview of the question of indeterminacy. Section 2 discusses the thesis that the world is comprised of indeterminate objects, whereas Section 3 focuses on the thesis that there are indeterminate states of affairs. Finally, Section 4 is devoted to the case study of indeterminacy in quantum physics.
What motivated Beckett, in 1937, to distance himself from the 'most recent work' of his mentor James Joyce, and instead praise the writings of Gertrude Stein as better reflecting his 'very desirable literature of the non-word'? This Element conducts the first extended comparative study of Stein's role in the development of Beckett's aesthetics. In doing so it redresses the major critical lacuna that is Stein's role and influence on Beckett's nascent bilingual aesthetics of the late 1930s. It argues for Stein's influence on the aesthetics of language Beckett developed throughout the 1930s, and on the overall evolution of his bilingual English writings, arguing that Stein's writing was itself inherently bilingual. It forwards the technique of renarration – a form of repetition identifiable in the work of both authors – as a deliberate narrative strategy adopted by both authors to actualise the desired semantic tearing concordant with their aesthetic praxes in English.
This Element addresses questions of division of labor and concentration of authority among intergovernmental organizations by examining multilevel governance in the Global South. It focuses on the policy domains of peace and security and human rights in Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), and its central finding is that the extent of governance regionalization varies across regions and issue areas. In the domain of peace and security, governance is most regionalized in Africa. In the domain of human rights protection, governance is most regionalized in the LAC region. Given the phenomenon of regional specialization, the Element makes the case for the greater explanatory power of regional drivers of regional institutional development. This Element is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element answers four questions. Can any traditional theory of scientific explanation make sense of the place of mathematics in explanation? If traditional monist theories are inadequate, is there some way to develop a more flexible, but still monist, approach that will clarify how mathematics can help to explain? What sort of pluralism about explanation is best equipped to clarify how mathematics can help to explain in science and in mathematics itself? Finally, how can the mathematical elements of an explanation be integrated into the physical world? Some of the evidence for a novel scientific posit may be traced to the explanatory power that this posit would afford, were it to exist. Can a similar kind of explanatory evidence be provided for the existence of mathematical objects, and if not, why not?
This Element shows how New Religious Movements variously conceptualize science and provides readers with an overview of the scholarly conversation surrounding this phenomenon. The first section describes five movements that, in different ways, include relevant references to science in their doctrines: Dianetics/Scientology, the Raëlian Movement, Falun Gong, Stella Azzurra (an Italian Santo Daime group), and Bambini di Satana (an Italian Satanist group). The conceptualization of science within such movements is examined in reference to official beliefs conveyed by the writings and claims of their respective leaders, but ethnographic work among affiliates is included as well. The second section reconstructs academic contributions by scholars who identify notable trends in the conceptualization of science within new religious movements, or have developed typologies to describe that very understanding. The third section concludes the discussion of new religious movements and science by offering suggestions regarding novel directions that the study of their relationship may take.
This Element will reevaluate the relationship between monasticism and the city in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the period 400 to 700 in both post-Roman West and the eastern Mediterranean, putting both of those areas in conversation. Building on recent scholarship on the nature of late antique urbanism, the authors can observe that the links between late antique Christian thought and the late and post-Roman urban space were far more relevant to the everyday practice of monasticism than previously thought. By comparing Latin, Greek and Syriac sources from a broad geographical area, the authors gain a birds' eye view on the enduring importance of urbanism in a late and post-Roman monastic world.
Over the past few decades, evolutionary psychology has shed light on such features of the human experience as mating, love, religion, aggression, warfare, physical health, mental health, and more. The field of positive psychology has progressed along a parallel trajectory, using behavioral science techniques to help our understanding of human thriving at the individual and community levels. Positive Evolutionary Psychology is dedicated to the integration of positive and evolutionary psychology, with an eye toward using Darwinian-inspired concepts to help advance our understanding of human thriving. This Element describes the basic ideas of this new approach to behavioral science as well as examples that dip into various aspects of the human experience, including such topics as health, education, friendships, love, and more–all with an eye toward providing a roadmap for the application of Darwinian principles to better understanding human thriving and the good life.
The Aztec Economy provides a synthesis and updated examination of the Aztec economy (1325–1521 AD). It is organized around seven components that recur with other Elements in this series: historic and geographic background, domestic economy, institutional economy, specialization, forms of distribution and commercialization, economic development, and future directions. The Aztec world was complex, hierarchical, and multifaceted, and was in a constant state of demographic growth, recoveries from natural disasters, political alignments and realignments, and aggressive military engagements. The economy was likewise complex and dynamic, and characterized by intensive agriculture, exploitation of non-agricultural resources, utilitarian and luxury manufacturing, wide-scale specialization, merchants, markets, commodity monies, and tribute systems.
Just transition prompts us to explore a number of important dimensions of Earth System Governance research, including sustainability transformations, inequality, power and justice. This Element aims to place just transition in the dynamics of the world political economy over the last several decades and to offer an overview of the varieties of just transitions based on an analytical scheme that focuses on their breadth (coverage), depth (social and ecological priorities) and ambition. The focus on breadth, depth and ambition centers on power, inequality and injustice and allows us to analyze and compare just transitions as a prerequisite for their fuller interpretation.
The Hroswitha Club was a group of women book collectors who met from 1944–2004 in the Eastern United States. Despite the fame of individual members like Henrietta Bartlett or Mary Hyde Eccles, there is no sustained study of the Club's work and legacy. This Element makes this history broadly accessible and focuses on how members shared knowledge and expertise and provided a space for legitimacy and self-growth in a period where women's access to formal education and academic institutions was limited. By making this network visible through an examination of archival records, library catalogs, and pamphlets, this project positions the Club as a case study for a more thorough examination of the ways that intersectional identities can make visible or obscure whose intellect, money, and resources have shaped the study of rare books in the United States.
In this Element, the authors consider fully discretized p-Laplacian problems (evolution, boundary value and variational problems) on graphs. The motivation of nonlocal continuum limits comes from the quest of understanding collective dynamics in large ensembles of interacting particles, which is a fundamental problem in nonlinear science, with applications ranging from biology to physics, chemistry and computer science. Using the theory of graphons, the authors give a unified treatment of all the above problems and establish the continuum limit for each of them together with non-asymptotic convergence rates. They also describe an algorithmic framework based proximal splitting to solve these discrete problems on graphs.
Since democratization, Latin America has experienced a surge in new forms of citizen participation. Yet there is still little comparative knowledge on these so-called democratic innovations. This Element seeks to fill this gap. Drawing on a new dataset with 3,744 cases from 18 countries between 1990 and 2020, it presents the first large-N cross-country study of democratic innovations to date. It also introduces a typology of twenty kinds of democratic innovations, which are based on four means of participation, namely deliberation, citizen representation, digital engagement, and direct voting. Adopting a pragmatist, problem-driven approach, this Element claims that democratic innovations seek to enhance democracy by addressing public problems through combinations of those four means of participation in pursuit of one or more of five ends of innovations, namely accountability, responsiveness, rule of law, social equality, and political inclusion.
Readers are essential agents in the production of bestsellers but bestsellers are not essential to readers' leisure pursuits. The starting point in this Element is readers' opinions about and their uses of bestselling fiction in English. Readers' relationships with bestsellers bring into view their practices of book selection, and their navigation of book recommendation culture. Based on three years of original research (2019–2021), including a quantitative survey with readers, interviews with social media influencers, and qualitative work with international Gen Z readers in a private Instagram chat space, the authors highlight three core actions contemporary multimodal readers make– choosing, connecting, and responding– in a transmedia era where on- and offline media practices co-exist. The contemporary multimodal reader, or the MMR3, they argue, illustrates the pervasiveness of recommendation culture, reliance on trusted others, and an ethic of responsiveness.
An often-forgotten passage of Philip Converse's classic essay on mass belief systems introduced the concept of an issue public – a segment of voters that has crystallized attitudes about a particular topic. Some people deeply care about particular topics, and they might be equipped to reach judgments on these topics. This simple idea could provide an important corrective to work that casts citizens' political competence in a negative light. But, previous attempts to evaluate the issue publics hypothesis have been unsatisfying. This Element proposes and tests a new measurement approach for identifying issue publics. The evidence gathered leads to the conclusion that issue publics exist, but are smaller and more particularistic than existing scholarship presumes them to be. As such, researchers underappreciate the significance of issue opinions in electoral politics.
The value of great leaders seems to be an unquestioned assumption. The goal of this Element is to explore the counterintuitive idea that great leaders can pose a hazard to themselves and their followers. Great leadership, which accomplishes morally commendable and difficult objectives by leaders and followers, requires competence, morality, and charisma. A hazard is a condition or event that leads to human loss, such as injury, death, or economic misfortune. A leader can become a hazard through social psychological processes, which operate through the metaphor of Seven Deadly Sins, to create negative consequences. Great leaders can undermine their own success and accomplishments, as well as their followers. They can become a threat to the organization in which they are employed. Finally, great leaders can become a danger to the larger society. The damage great leaders can create can be reduced by applying the corresponding virtue.
Modality is a vast phenomenon. In fact, it is arguably a plurality of phenomena. Within it, one type of modality warrants distinctive interest in philosophy and, in particular, in metaphysics. In view of this, this Element has a first part devoted to modality as a general phenomenon, where different types of modalities are distinguished, and where the question of unification is raised. Following this, the second part is focused on metaphysical modality: the type of modality that is of distinctive interest in metaphysics, and thus for the series of this Element. In this second part, the overarching question is about the source of metaphysical modality, and the discussion here informs back, and is informed by, the question of unification from the first part. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.