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For over two decades, political communication research has hailed the potentially reinvigorating effect of social media on democracy. Social media was expected to provide new opportunities for people to learn about politics and public affairs, and to participate politically. Building on two systematic literature reviews on social media, and its effects on political participation and knowledge (2000–2020), and introducing empirical evidence drawing on four original US survey data that expands for over a decade (2009–2020), this Element contends that social media has only partially fulfilled this tenet, producing a Social Media Democracy Mirage. That is, social media have led to a socio-political paradox in which people are more participatory than ever, yet not necessarily more informed.
During the late Iron Age (800–539 BCE) in the semi-arid southern Levant, small competing kingdoms navigated a tenuous position between their local populace and the external empires who dominated the region. For kingdoms such as Judah and Edom, this period was also one of opportunity due to their location at the intersection of lucrative trade networks connecting the Mediterranean and Arabian worlds. Such economic opportunity, together with subsistence practices rooted in mobility, resulted in a diverse and contested social landscape in the northeastern Negev borderland region between these two kingdoms. This Element explores the multifaceted interactions in this landscape. Insightful case studies highlight patterns of cross-cultural interaction and identity negotiation through the lenses of culinary practices, religion, language, and text. Ultimately, this analysis explores the lived realities of the region's inhabitants, migrants, and traders over multiple generations, emphasizing social diversity and entanglement as an integral feature of the region.
Every philosophy is a celebration of the fact that being can be thought, that the world around us yields to concepts that join together into arguments which can lead us to new thoughts and new ways of thinking. Heidegger's great talent was to never lose his philosophical wonder at philosophy, to never stop thinking about thinking. Heidegger's early work favors a somewhat pragmatic view of thinking as organized by and around our projects, emphasizing tacit skills over articulate conscious thinking. It also explores stepping back from all projects in dread and wonder. His later thinking is reciprocal rather than autonomous, something we do with and for being instead of something we do to or on beings, which can help overcome contemporary nihilism. After the death of God, we may no longer be able to pray to a divinity, but we can still be the thinkers of being.
This Element presents an investigation into the use of the gender inclusive strategy schwa in a corpus of tweets; the schwa is employed in Italian to overcome grammatical (feminine and masculine) morphological inflections, having at its core linguistic and social binarism. The investigation is set in a country where LGBTQIA communities still face institutional discrimination, yet it is contextualised in the growing work on inclusivity discussed in languages and contexts worldwide. The corpus is examined quantitatively and qualitatively, as well as read through a triangulation of two frameworks: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. The findings, obtained from corpus-assisted research and digital ethnography, show that the new linguistic strategy is used creatively, functionally, and not exclusively as a self-representation tool but is also a viable and powerful replacement for generic sexist language.
This Element surveys the main claims of Bernard Williams's ethical philosophy. Topics include ethical scepticism, virtue, reasons for action, the critique of the Morality System, moral realism and the nature of theorising in ethics.
This Element discusses how pervasive cronyism and restricted suffrage are destroying democratic capitalism as a national ideal and offers suggestions on how the promise of US-style democratic capitalism can be restored. To this end, the author draws on the work of political philosopher and democracy advocate Danielle Allen in calling attention to the principle of political equality, as well as the two related sub-principles of reciprocity and power sharing, as essential guides. Based on these ideas, a series of practical steps is suggested to make economic and political markets more democratic by curbing cronyism and expanding citizens' access to the political processes governing the nation. The author also discusses how private corporations can become more 'democracy supporting.' The Element ends with some reflections on the moral culture required to restore and sustain public trust and confidence in democratic capitalism as a system of economic and political governance.
Peace dwelling is formulated as a reciprocal relationship among four interrelated ways of 'Being': Being a Guardian, Being a Curator, Being a Welcoming Presence, and Being a Neighbour. These ways of 'Being' are connected to a systemic reconstruction of Burns' formulation of the essential task of leadership, which encompasses the interconnectedness among the affairs of the Head (consciousness raising because values exist only where there is consciousness), the Heart (feeling the need to meaningfully define values, because where nothing is felt, nothing matters), the Hands (purposeful action) and the Holy (treating persons like persons as a non-negotiable and sacred practice, while believing that all persons can be lifted into their better selves). Corresponding to the four ways of Being, Peace Leadership is interpreted as the art of learning how to properly integrate the affairs of 4-Hs into our own shared lived existence for the sake of dwelling in peace.
This Element is a historical tour of Ukraine from the medieval Kyivan prince Volodymyr the Great through to Ukraine's twenty-first-century rock star president Volodymyr Zelensky. It presents Ukraine as an actor, not a pawn, in international history. And it focuses on people. In the past, historians wrote about Ukraine from a colonial perspective that portrayed it as a region, not its own entity. This shaped the way people thought about Ukraine and created mental maps where it was just part of something else. Put in contemporary terms, Ukraine was subjected to a historical disinformation war. This Element joins voices that are decolonizing that way of thinking by drawing a different mental map, one where Ukraine exists as itself. It explains how the people living on its lands have their own distinct history, how they shaped it, were shaped by it, and had an impact on both European and global history.
'Body horror', a horror subgenre concerned with transformation, loss of control and the human body's susceptibility to disease, infection and external harm, has moved into the mainstream to become one of the greatest repositories of biopolitical discourse. Put simply, body horror acts out the power flows of modern life, visualising often imperceptible or ignored processes of marginalisation and behavioural policing, and revealing how interrelations between different social spheres (medical, legal, political, educational) produce embodied identity. This book offers the first sustained study of the types of body horror that have been popular in the twenty-first century and centres on the representational and ideological work they carry out. It proposes that, thanks to the progressive vision of feminist, queer and anti-racist practitioners, this important subgenre has expanded its ethical horizons and even found a sense of celebratory liberation in fantastic metamorphoses redolent of contemporary activist movements.
This Element provides an overview of Aegeomania: the fascination, sometimes bordering on the obsession, with the Aegean Bronze Age, which manifests itself in the uses of Aegean Bronze Age material culture to create something new in literature, the visual and performing arts, and many other cultural practices. It discusses the role that Aegeomania can play in our understanding of the Aegean Bronze Age and illustrates this with examples from the 1870s to the present, which include, among many others, poems by Emma Lazarus, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Giorgos Seferis; novels by Kristmann Gudmundsson, Mary Renault, Don DeLillo, Zeruya Shalev, and Sally Rooney; Freudian psychoanalysis; sculptures by Henry Moore and Pablo Picasso; music by Harrison Birtwistle and the rock band Giant Squid; films by Robert Wise and Wolfang Petersen; elegant textiles and garments created by Josef Frank and Karl Lagerfeld. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Since Barack Obama's historic and unprecedented field operations in 2008 and 2012, campaigns have centralized their voter contact operations within field offices: storefronts rented in strategically chosen communities. That model was upended in 2020: Joe Biden won the election without any offices (due to COVID-19), while Donald Trump's campaign opened over 300. Using two decades of data on office locations and interviews with campaign staffers, we show how the strategic placement and electoral impact of local field offices changed over the past twenty years, including differences in partisan strategy and effectiveness. We find that offices are somewhat more effective for Democrats than Republicans, but Democratic field operations are declining while Republicans' are increasing. We conclude by assessing whether future campaigns will invest in offices again – or if the rebirth of storefront campaigning is over and the future of political campaigning is purely digital.
Organizations rise or fall based on misreading of external signals as well as internal factors – strong or weak management, leadership and governance, proactive or reactive benchmarks of innovation and performance. This Element addresses the commercial aerospace sector the case study of Boeing Corporation. Boeing and Airbus illustrate the dynamics of competitive rivalry, the shifting attention span of senior leaders. Beset by internal dysfunctions, product delays and certification challenges, Boeing has a negative net worth, and perverse executive incentives, financial engineering values, and governance dysfunctions when confronting the changes facing the main customers, the airline industry. Boeing trails its European rival in market share, R&D investments, and diverse product line based on seat size, pricing, and distance. This case study provides an opportunity to suggest new research directions on governance and managing truly complex organizations.
From the toils of Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan emerges a twenty-first-century leader, Stacey Abrams. This Element explores the strategic organizing acumen of Fannie Lou Hamer in Mississippi and across the South, and the rise of Barbara Jordan, the second Black woman elected to the House of Representatives and the first Black woman from the US South to head to Congress. The leadership skills and collective political efforts of these two women paved the way for the emergence of Stacey Abrams, candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018 and 2022, and organizer of an electoral movement that helped deliver the 2020 presidential victory and US Senate majority to the Democratic Party. This Element adds to the existing literature by framing Black women as integral to the expansion of new voters into the Democratic Party, American democracy, and to the political development of Black people in the US South.
This study of forensic crime fiction from the US and the UK examines the prominent roles that women play in many of these novels, arguing that there are historical continuities with earlier forms of contact with the dead body. Refuting claims that the female forensic examiner exhibits traits of typically masculine behaviour, it suggests that the female gaze humanises the victims of crime and alters their representations. Utilising the views of a world-famous forensic scientist interviewed for this Element, this study also explores the role and treatment of science in forensic crime fiction, shedding light on an area of the genre. Finally, there is a consideration of killers in forensic crime novels, proposing that the relationship between killer and investigator is different from that of the classic crime novel. There are also two Appendices containing interviews with Professor Niamh Nic Daeid and with Val McDermid.
This Element outlines current issues in the study of speech acts. It starts with a brief outline of four waves of speech act theory, that is, the philosophical, the experimental, the corpus-based and the discursive approaches. It looks at some of the early experimental and corpus-based methods and discusses their more recent developments as a background to the most important trends in current speech act research. Discursive approaches shift the focus from single utterances to interaction and interactional sequences. Multimodal approaches show that the notion of 'speech act' needs to be extended in order to cover the multimodality of communicative acts. And diachronic approaches focus on the historicity of speech acts. The final section discusses some open issues and potential further developments of speech act research.
In this Element, the authors introduce Bayesian probability and inference for social science students and practitioners starting from the absolute beginning and walk readers steadily through the Element. No previous knowledge is required other than that in a basic statistics course. At the end of the process, readers will understand the core tenets of Bayesian theory and practice in a way that enables them to specify, implement, and understand models using practical social science data. Chapters will cover theoretical principles and real-world applications that provide motivation and intuition. Because Bayesian methods are intricately tied to software, code in both R and Python is provided throughout.
Power. Gender. Sustainability. This Element harnesses powerful new data about gender and sustainability, presents inspiring stories of empowerment, and introduces a framework for building empowerment muscles. First, from a pioneering global survey, it unveils three shocking truths about young women's empowerment. It also compiles significant data on systemic gender disempowerment intersecting environmental degradation, violence, and exclusion, as well as profound societal impact if girls and women were fully empowered. Second, from climate activist Greta Thunberg to the all girl Afghan robotics team, the #NeverAgain movement against gun violence, and the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, today's empowered girls are a transformative force for change. Each modeling a distinct skill - an empowerment muscle - seven case studies present empowerment muscles of focus, solidarity, hope, courage, advocacy, endurance, and healing. Third, unlike most works using empowerment nebulously, this Element concretizes empowerment - a set of muscles each reader can build and strengthen through 'workout' training exercises.
This Element contributes to the interdisciplinary study of mariachi, especially in the United States, by focusing on two areas that have yet to receive substantive academic attention: philanthropy and museum studies. In 2011, UNESCO included mariachi music on its list of expressions of intangible cultural heritage. While it is undoubtedly true that mariachi is in many ways intangible, this downplays expressions of its rich material culture and the work of scholars to research mariachi history beyond an emphasis on musical performance. The first section considers mariachi collecting and philanthropy in the US, especially the efforts of Edward E. Marsh and Chris Strachwitz. The second section examines the first major mariachi history museum/exhibit in the US, managed by the Mariachi Scholarship Foundation and housed at Southwestern College in California. Finally, some open areas for research are proposed and appendices concerning mariachi studies in the US are provided.
The global financial system is the economic bedrock of the contemporary liberal economic order. Contrary to other global-economy areas, finance is rarely analyzed in discussions on contestations of economic liberalism. However, a quite comprehensive process of external contestation of the global financial order (GFO) is underway. This contestation occurs through the rising share of emerging market economies within global finance in recent years, especially the rise of the BRICS economies. This Element investigates whether and how the BRICS contest the contemporary GFO by conducting a systematic empirical analysis across seven countries, eleven issues areas and three dimensions. This contestation occurs across issue areas but is mostly concentrated on the domestic and transnational dimension, not the international level on which much research focuses. Rather than the entire BRICS, it is especially China, Russia and India that contest liberal finance. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element examines two prominent public health crises – the emergence of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in British cattle and the COVID-19 pandemic. It contends that a group of arguments called the informal fallacies functioned as cognitive heuristics and facilitated public health reasoning during both crises. These arguments, which include the argument from ignorance, the argument from authority, and circular argument, are particularly well adapted to the type of uncertainty that surrounds the emergence of novel infectious diseases. By bridging gaps in knowledge, these arguments can facilitate reasoning when evidence about these diseases is limited and the need to take action is urgent. The Element charts a public health journey beginning in the 1950s with a disease called kuru, then examines the response to the emergence of BSE in 1986 and extends to the present day with the COVID-19 pandemic. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.