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Explores how scientific meaning and decision-making are filtered through the stories we tell about science and through our social, cultural, and personal identities. Focusing on mothers as a prominent and important identity in science communication, this Element explores both the obstacles and the opportunities for public engagement with scientific topics. After providing an overview of the nexus of science communication, stories, and identities, the author applies key insights from these topics to the case study of motherhood in the climate change and vaccination controversies. They then offer science communication strategies based on these insights for science communicators, mothers, and other caregivers. This analysis is original research that demonstrates the value of understanding stories and identities in mobilizing mothers for both science skepticism and science advocacy.
Traditionally, classical multivariate statistical methods have been applied to relate cultural materials recovered at archaeological sites to their respective raw material sources. However, when reviewing published research, which usually claims to have reached a high degree of confidence in the assignment of materials, the authors have detected that those applying these methods can make serious errors that compromise the inferences made. This Element reconsiders the use of statistical methods to address the problem of provenance analysis of archaeological materials using a step-by-step procedure that allows the recognition of natural groups in the data, thus obtaining better quality classifications while avoiding the problems of total or partial overlaps in the chemical groups (common in biplots). To evaluate the methods proposed here, the challenge of group search in ceramic materials is addressed using algorithms derived from model-based clustering. For cases with partial data labeling, a semi-supervised algorithm is applied to obsidian samples.
This Element serves as an invitation to architectural historians of modern European imperialism to embrace the insights and claims of the history of emotions. That said, the Element is not a call for an 'intimate', 'affective' or 'emotional' history. Rather, it is an attempt to show how the omission of emotions as mere effects of historical circumstances, devoid of reason, judgment and rationality, combined with a failure to historicise both emotions themselves and the relationship between buildings and feelings, impoverishes our understanding of European imperial architecture. The thematic content of the Element encompasses defining emotions, understanding power, multivalence, changing and unexpected experiences of imperial buildings and unlearning the experience of imperial architecture through the lens of the history of emotions.
Hegel famously argues that the patriarchal, bourgeois nuclear family is a rational institution worth defending. Scholars have asked what exactly to do with this seemingly outdated part of his social and political philosophy. In particular, they have wondered whether Hegel's concept of the family can accommodate changes to our understanding of what counts as a family and what constitutes family relations. In this Element, I ask whether Hegel's defense of the family can be reconciled with family abolition, the project not of reforming the family as an institution, but of radically transforming it beyond recognition. By examining the three relationships that Hegel associates with the family – brothers and sisters, husbands and wives, and parents and children – I argue that Hegel's concept of the family can be reconciled with family abolition so described. What Hegel provides is an account of the family as a site at which important goods have been discovered and eveloped, without claiming that the family as an institution is necessary for, or even ideally suited to, their continued realization. These goods are singular individuality, ethical love, and material resources.
Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past explores why autocracies intentionally exacerbate anxieties associated with an aggrieved ethnoterritorial minority's tangible heritage. Since discriminatory domestic campaigns of state-sponsored erasure are political choices, this theoretical study proposes to understand them as sovereign heritage crimes. This framework predicts that heritage securitisation - constructing disquieting material memories into ontological threats - enables legitimacy-deficient yet affluent autocracies to pursue 'performance legitimacy' by delivering a real or imagined 'permanent security'. Since this state crime is both enabled and exposed by traditional and emerging technologies, the study also explores their dual use for human rights and wrongs. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element is about the relationship between the political thought of the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) and a tradition of political thinking known as republicanism that traces its roots at least to 15th century Florence and perhaps further back to Aristotle. Throughout, we will be investigating this relationship along two dimensions. First, we will be asking whether it advances our understanding of Hegel's thought to consider him to be a republican, and if so, in what way and to what extent. The point here is not to assimilate Hegel to a cause or a label, but to see whether the individual outlines of Hegel's thought might be brought into focus by adopting the lens of republicanism. Second, we will be considering whether Hegel's thought offers criticism of various other forms of republicanism and how we might evaluate that criticism.
The extreme instability caused by the interminable war in Ukraine, Sino-American tensions, and Trump's return to power raises an essential question: How can the states of the Global South – particularly those endowed with significant resources and full of ambition – navigate this current global turbulence? Are they succumbing to the logic of bipolarity, or are they escaping from it by amplifying their hedging power, and, in the process, making the international system more multipolar? To answer these key questions, we analyze the strategic behavior of eight states: India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, South Africa, and Brazil. Their selection is based on eight precise metrics. It is these eight key states that we call the Hedgers. They are among the countries of the Global South that have good opportunities to navigate – with some challenges – the troubled environment of what is increasingly difficult to call the 'world order.'
Heritage branding and heirloom cultures are twin strategies for building brands in global markets. In this Element, the authors analyze these strategies through skyr; a traditional, sour dairy from Iceland. They explore how live microbial cultures in skyr have been 'heritagized' as heirloom cultures to build a brand advantage. Live skyr cultures, they show, illustrate symbiotic relations over millennia between microbial cultures and human cultures. The industrialization of this species interaction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they argue, ultimately converted a mutualistic relation into a parasitic one. Moreover, they demonstrate a parallel inversion of gender relations in the production and consumption of skyr as part of its industrialization and export. Ironically, these transformations undermine the industry's promotion of the cultures and heritage to which it has effectively put an end. They ask whether there is a more general lesson in this about the relationship between industrialization, capitalism, and heritage.
The established idea that people learn about politics and relevant societal issues via the news media can be put into question because of a 'twin challenge of increased media choice.' First, there is a growing number of people who choose to avoid most news which leaves them uninformed about what is happening in politics and society. Second, people may form their beliefs based on false and misleading information, leading them to become misinformed about current political issues. This Element investigated both challenges based on data from a large comparative survey in eighteen Western countries. Consistent with the existing literature, the results largely confirm the added value of staying informed through using traditional news media, the public broadcaster in particular. In contrast, consuming news from newer media sources such as social media and messaging apps is typically associated across countries with less knowledge and more misperceptions about political matters.
Do politicians have to get dirty hands – and what does that mean? Is it okay to be corrupt, when corruption is systemic? When is it a good thing to make compromises in politics? These are questions about political conduct that are raised in political ethics, a somewhat underappreciated subfield of political philosophy. This Element offers a fresh, systematic introduction to political ethics. It starts with a discussion of two challenges to the discipline: One comes from political realists who reject moralism in political philosophy and the other from public choice theorists who model politicians as rational egoists. It then discusses the problem of dirty hands, political corruption, and political compromise as three core topics of political ethics.
This Element presents what we know about the construction of sexuality and the sex lives of the residents of ancient Mesopotamia, Anatolia, and the Levant. After briefly introducing the regions and cultures under consideration and the sources of data, the work turns to female and male experiences of sexuality, matters of fertility and infertility, sexual orientation, and finally sex crimes. Primary sources are heavily foregrounded so that readers may understand what the sources of information are on these topics and may see how scholars have come to the understandings that they have.
Previous research demonstrates that women's participation in peace processes impacts the adoption of gendered peace provisions but leaves questions about whether women can also shape their implementation. This Element argues that women political representatives shape the implementation of gender provisions in peace agreements. In particular, it considers the role of women elected to rebel parties and ex-rebel women representatives. It tests the relationship between women's political representation and the implementation of gender peace provisions using a novel dataset focusing on the implementation of agreements signed in Africa conflicts between 1990 and 2024. The authors supplement their statistical analyses with case evidence from Angola, Rwanda, and Colombia. They find that women's parliamentary representation, especially that of former rebels in rebel parties, has a positive effect on compliance with gender provisions. These findings contribute to the understanding of women's post-war political influence, the implementation of gendered peace provisions, and rebel party politics.
This Element examines aviation English as a global lingua franca through the lens of communities of practice. Pilots and air traffic controllers involved in international operations belong to multiple communities, including local professional, broader local aviation, and international aviation communities. Their ongoing learning within these communities and the repertoire they develop – which influences their interactions – are explored. Against this framework, the inadequacy of the current internationally applicable language proficiency requirements is critically evaluated, alongside an analysis of four notable aircraft accidents that motivated these standards. The focus then shifts to analysing live radiotelephony discourse in abnormal situations, incorporating insights from domain specialists. Findings show that language-related aspects alone are insufficient; when combined with limited domain knowledge, it can lead to unsafe and ineffective communication. The Element highlights accommodation – both for linguistic and domain-specific – as a crucial skill in this intercultural communication context and recommends greater standardisation for handling abnormal situations.
Exploring 'early globalism and Chinese literature' through the lens of 'literary diffusion,' this Element analyzes two primary forms. The first is Buddhist literary diffusion, whose revolutionary impact on Chinese language and literature is illustrated through scriptural translation, transformation texts, and 'journey to the West' stories. The second, facilitated diffusion, engages with the maritime world, traced through the seafaring journey of Cinderella stories and the totalizing worldview in literature on Zheng He's voyages. The authors contend that early global literary diffusion left a lasting imprint on Chinese language, literature, and culture. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element focuses on three Chinese productions of The Vagina Monologues (TVM, 1996), a radical-feminist play by the North American artist and activist Eve Ensler: Yin Dao Du Bai (The Vagina Monologues, 2003), Yin Dao Zhi Dao (Vagina's Way, 2013), and Dao Yin (Saying Vagina, 2021). Each production was staged in and informed by the changing landscape of Chinese feminism: from 2003 to the early 2010s, the making of TVM was a process of exploring the subject position of an autonomous citizen, but from 2015, feminist theatre making had to contend with gains being eroded by state neoliberalism, an issue reflected in the third performance, Dao Yin (2021). Drawing on this historical analysis, in the fifth and final section, the author proposes the concept of 'collapsed feminisms' to argue that Chinese feminist theatres from 2003 to 2021 staged an extremely complicated scene where all these feminisms overlapped and 'collapsed' together.
This Element introduces the basics of Bayesian regression modeling using modern computational tools. This Element only assumes that the reader has taken a basic statistics course and has seen Bayesian inference at the introductory level of Gill and Bao (2024). Some matrix algebra knowledge is assumed but the authors walk carefully through the necessary structures at the start of this Element. At the end of the process readers will fully understand how Bayesian regression models are developed and estimated, including linear and nonlinear versions. The sections cover theoretical principles and real-world applications in order to provide motivation and intuition. Because Bayesian methods are intricately tied to software, code in R and Python is provided throughout.
This Element interrogates the complex role of gender in shaping the sociolinguistic variable of UPTALK within Hong Kong English, highlighting its interaction with other sociodemographic factors. Foregrounding gender as a central factor, the Element employs a robust array of methodologies to dissect how gender interacts with social factors, identities, and social types across a sample of sixteen participants. Findings unveil new perspectives on gender-dependent meanings of UPTALK, demonstrating that while gendered stylistic accommodation plays a notable role, UPTALK is not merely a gender marker. Instead, it embodies complex social meanings shaped by a broad spectrum of individual, cognitive (awareness), and contextual factors. By integrating both production and perception/attitudinal data from a relatively unexplored context, the Element provides a holistic, nuanced understanding of how UPTALK can function as a multifunctional sociolinguistic resource, offering insights into the theorization of language variation and social meaning, with particular focus on the role of gender.
Disability is central to the Gothic imagination. This Element draws together disability and Gothic literature in ways that show the interplay between them. The first chapter offers a brief history of Critical Disability Studies, and the manner in which Gothic has been integral to the evolution of disability theory. It shows the increasing centrality of the Gothic to the development of Critical Disability Studies, and describes the emergence of the subfield of Gothic Disability Studies. The second chapter and third chapters offer close readings of particular texts, showing how Gothic bodies and minds articulate and shift their relationship to the aesthetic and affective frameworks of the nineteenth century. While disability sometimes represents the 'other' in Gothic literature, this positioning far from exhausts the ways in which disability is presented in this genre.
Why do well-meaning developmental policies fail? Power intervenes. Consider the recent collapse of the peace agreement between the Colombian government and FARC guerillas. Achieving inclusive development entails resolving collective-action problems of forging cooperation among agents with disparate interests and understandings. Resolution relies on developing functional informal and formal institutions. Powerful agents shape institutional evolution—because they can. This Element outlines a conceptual framework for policy-relevant inquiry. It addresses the concept of power-noting sources, instruments, manifestations, domains of operation, and strategic templates. After discussing leadership, following, and brokerage, it addresses institutional entrepreneurship. Institutional entrepreneurs develop narratives and actions to influence incentives and interpretations of social norms and identities: foundations of strategic interactions that shape institutional evolution. This approach facilitates inquiry into the roots and consequences of context-specific developmental dilemmas: background for developmental policy analysis. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
The future is contingent. It can unfold differently, hinging on chance or choice within the present. This Element tells the story of how these twin concepts have developed across human history. Arcing from our earliest ancestors, through al-Ghazālī, to S. J. Gould, the Element demonstrates how humans realised the future is an undecided, contingent place – at scales leading beyond the biographical, up to the planetary, and beyond. It pinpoints this realisation as an ongoing and unfinished intellectual revolution. Just as the telescope revealed Deep Space in the 1600s, and the geologists' hammer revealed Deep Time in the 1800s, contemporary developments in science are revealing what I call Deep Possibility. This is the realisation that there is far more possible than will ever be actual. It is this that makes history matter, and gives contingency its bite, insofar as it forces acknowledgement that not all outcomes will come to pass regardless.