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2107 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 31 of 106

Our Urban Planet in Theory and History

Our Urban Planet in Theory and History
  • Carl Nightingale
  • Published online:
    14 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element offers seven propositions toward a theory of 'Our Urban Planet' that is useful to global urban historians. I argue that historians have much to offer to theorists particularly those involved in debates over planetary urbanization theory and the Anthropocene. We must enlarge our concept of 'urban' to include spaces that make cities possible and that cities make possible and become comfortable with longer temporal frames that nest global urban history within Earth Time. Above all we need to add the crucial dimension of power, redefining cities as spaces that humans produce to amplify harvests of geo-solar energy and deploy human power within space and time. The element uses insights from 'deep history' to set the stage for a 'theory by verb' elaborating the many paradoxes of humans' 6,000-year gamble with the Urban Condition and explaining cities' own intrinsic capacity to outrun their own theorizability.
Writing the History of the African Diaspora

Writing the History of the African Diaspora
  • Toyin Falola
  • Published online:
    14 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element is an analysis of the African Diaspora. It will define the African Diaspora and how the concepts behind the term came to be socially and historically engineered. The African diaspora is then placed into a broader historical context where the diverse, global, and overlapping histories of Africa's ancient-ongoing diasporas will be explored. In particular, themes of injustice, agency, resistance, and diversity (regarding people, diasporas, and experiences) will feature heavily. Through this exploration, this Element will interrogate dominating narratives regarding African diaspora-related discourse, seeking to address prevailing ideas that inadequately capture the true complexity and nuance of the subject. It does so to construct a more comprehensive understanding of the subject matter while lining out a more holistic approach to thinking about the very nature of 'diaspora.' Finally, this Element will analyze the present circumstances of the African diaspora, bringing into conversation a progressively global and connected world.
Can Governance be Intelligent?

Can Governance be Intelligent?
  • An Interdisciplinary Approach and Evolutionary Modelling for Intelligent Governance in the Digital Age
  • Eran Vigoda-Gadot
  • Published online:
    14 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Intelligence is a concept that occurs in multiple contexts and has various meanings. It refers to the ability of human beings and other entities to think and understand the world around us. It represents a set of skills directed at problem-solving and targeted at producing effective results. Thus, intelligence and governance are an odd couple. We expect governments and other governing institutions to operate in an intelligent manner, but too frequently we criticize their understanding of serious public problems, their decisions, behaviors, managerial skills, ability to solve urgent problems, and overall governability wisdom. This manuscript deals with such questions using interdisciplinary insights (i.e., psychological, social, institutional, biological, technological) on intelligence and integrating it with knowledge in governance, administration, and management in public and non-profit sectors. We propose the IntelliGov framework, that may extend both our theoretical, methodological, analytical, and applied understanding of intelligent governance in the digital age.
Theatricality, Playtexts and Society

Theatricality, Playtexts and Society
  • David Barnett
  • Published online:
    13 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
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  • This Element proposes a novel way of defining, understanding and approaching theatricality, a term that exists both in the theatre and, more broadly, in everyday life. It argues that four foundational, material processes of theatre-making manifest themselves in all playtexts in both overt and covert forms. Each of the four sections defines a different theatrical process, explores its functions in two chosen playtexts and examines its implications for the wider experience of the spectators outside the theatre. The Element concludes with a supplementary reflection on performance to show how even seemingly untheatrical playtexts can be analysed and staged to reveal their unspoken theatricality. It also argues that this new understanding of theatricality has a politics, that the artifice of any theatre and the constructedness of any society are analogous and that both, consequently, can be fundamentally changed. This Element is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Evolutionary Games and the Replicator Dynamics

Evolutionary Games and the Replicator Dynamics
  • Saul Mendoza-Palacios, Onésimo Hernández-Lerma
  • Published online:
    13 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element introduces the replicator dynamics for symmetric and asymmetric games where the strategy sets are metric spaces. Under this hypothesis the replicator dynamics evolves in a Banach space of finite signed measures. The authors provide a general framework to study the stability of the replicator dynamics for evolutionary games in this Banach space. This allows them to establish a relation between Nash equilibria and the stability of the replicator for normal a form games applicable to oligopoly models, theory of international trade, public good models, the tragedy of commons, and War of attrition game among others. They also provide conditions to approximate the replicator dynamics on a space of measures by means of a finite-dimensional dynamical system and a sequence of measure-valued Markov processes.
The Mereology of Classes

The Mereology of Classes
  • Gabriel Uzquiano
  • Published online:
    13 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element is a systematic study of the question of whether classes are composed of further parts. Mereology is the theory of the relation of part to whole, and we will ask how that relation applies to classes. One reason the issue has received attention in the literature is the hope that a clear picture of the mereology of classes may provide further insights into the foundations of set theory. We will consider two main perspectives on the mereology of classes on which classes are indeed composed of further parts. They, however, disagree as to the identity of those parts. Each perspective admits more than one implementation, and one of the purposes of this work is to explain what is at stake with each choice.
‘Ethiopia’ and the World, 330–1500 CE

‘Ethiopia’ and the World, 330–1500 CE
  • Yonatan Binyam, Verena Krebs
  • Published online:
    11 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This Cambridge Element offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the histories of the Ethiopian and Eritrean highlands from late antiquity to the late medieval period, updating traditional Western academic perspectives. Early scholarship, often by philologists and religious scholars, upheld 'Ethiopia' as an isolated repository of ancient Jewish and Christian texts. This work reframes the region's history, highlighting the political, economic, and cultural interconnections of different kingdoms, polities, and peoples. Utilizing recent advancements in Ethiopian and Eritrean Studies as well as Medieval Studies, it reevaluates key instances of contact between 'Ethiopia' and the world of Afro-Eurasia, situating the histories of the Christian, Muslim, and local-religious or 'pagan' groups living in the Red Sea littoral and the Eritrean-Ethiopian highlands in the context of the Global Middle Ages.
Cultural Burning

Cultural Burning
  • Bruno David, Michael-Shawn Fletcher, Simon Connor, Virginia Ruth Pullin, Jessie Birkett-Rees, Jean-Jacques Delannoy, Michela Mariani, Anthony Romano, S. Yoshi Maezumi
  • Published online:
    10 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
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  • This Element addresses a burning question – how can archaeologists best identify and interpret cultural burning, the controlled use of fire by people to shape and curate their physical and social landscapes? This Element describes what cultural burning is and presents current methods by which it can be identified in historical and archaeological records, applying internationally relevant methods to Australian landscapes. It clarifies how the transdisciplinary study of cultural burning by Quaternary scientists, historians, archaeologists and Indigenous community members is informing interpretations of cultural practices, ecological change, land use and the making of place. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Reclaiming the Cultural Politics of Teaching and Learning

Reclaiming the Cultural Politics of Teaching and Learning
  • Skooled in Punk
  • Greg Vass
  • Published online:
    09 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • Despite often being associated with anti-establishment, irreverent, and a do-it yourself (DIY) rejection of dominant culture, less considered may the collaborative, communal and curative threads of punk thinking, being and doing. From the outset, punk offered critiques and alternative ways of conceptualizing a world and ways of worlding, that aren't as harmful and constraining as those encountered by many in the dominant milieu of life. This monograph is focused on how and why punk can productively contribute to efforts that are responding to the influences of dominant culture in education, such as the effects of standardization, heightened accountabilities, and 'gap talk'. For this Element, punk can be thought of as social practices that generate cultural resources that can be utilized to critique dominant culture. Hence, this Element aims to make the case that punk sensibilities offer educators opportunities to reclaim the cultural politics of teaching and learning.
Computational Construction Grammar

Computational Construction Grammar
  • A Usage-Based Approach
  • Jonathan Dunn
  • Published online:
    08 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element introduces a usage-based computational approach to Construction Grammar that draws on techniques from natural language processing and unsupervised machine learning. This work explores how to represent constructions, how to learn constructions from a corpus, and how to arrange the constructions in a grammar as a network. From a theoretical perspective, this Element examines how construction grammars emerge from usage alone as complex systems, with slot-constraints learned at the same time that constructions are learned. From a practical perspective, this work is accompanied by a Python package which enables linguists to incorporate construction grammars into their own corpus-based work. The computational experiments in this Element are important for testing the learnability, variability, and confirmability of Construction Grammar as a theory of language. All code examples will leverage the cloud computing platform Code Ocean to guide readers through implementation of these algorithms.
LGBTQ+ and Feminist Digital Activism

LGBTQ+ and Feminist Digital Activism
  • A Linguistic Perspective
  • Angela Zottola
  • Published online:
    08 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • This Element focuses on the linguistic and discursive practices employed by digital citizens to promote their causes on social media, that is to engage in digital activism, drawing attention to the growing importance of this phenomenon in relation to gender identity and sexuality issues. I propose the label LGBTQ+ Digital Activism to join the already existing one Feminist Digital Activism and argue that, while these have been areas of interest from sociology and communication specialists, digital activism is still to be embraced as a field of research by applied linguists. I point out to a number of linguistic and discursive features that are popular among digital activists and support this through the analysis of the use of the hashtag #wontbeerased combining Social Media Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. I suggest that further research is needed to explore how language is used to propagate and popularize emancipatory discourses online.
International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity

International Bestsellers and the Online Reconfiguring of National Identity
  • Rachel Noorda, Millicent Weber, Melanie Ramdarshan Bold
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • International bestsellers are the ideal sites for examining the complicated relationship between literary culture and national identity. Despite the transnational turns in both literary studies and book history, place is still an important configurer of twenty-first-century book reception. Books are crucial to national identity and catalysts of nationalist movements. On an individual level, books enable readers to shape and maintain their own national identities. This Element explores how contemporary readers' understandings of nation, race/ethnicity, gender, and class continue to shape their reading, using as case studies the online reception of three bestseller titles-Liane Moriarty's Big Little Lies (Australia), Zadie Smith's NW (UK), and Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians (USA). In doing so, this Element demonstrates the need for and articulates a transnational conceptualisation of the relationship between reader identity and reception.
Bot-mimicry in Digital Literary Culture

Bot-mimicry in Digital Literary Culture
  • Imitating Imitative Software
  • Malthe Stavning Erslev
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This Element traverses the concept and practice of bot mimicry, defined as the imitation of imitative software, specifically the practice of writing in the style of social bots. Working as both an inquiry into and an extended definition of the concept, the Element argues that bot mimicry engenders a new mode of knowing about and relating to imitative software – as well as a distinctly literary approach to rendering and negotiating artificial intelligence imaginaries. The Element presents a software-oriented mode of understanding Internet culture, a novel reading of Alan Turing's imitation game, and the first substantial integration of Walter Benjamin's theory of the mimetic faculty into the study of digital culture, thus offering multiple unique lines of inquiry. Ultimately, the Element illuminates the value of mimicry – to the understanding of an emerging practice of digital literary culture, to practices of research, and to our very conceptions of artificial intelligence.
Private Equity and the Demise of the Local

Private Equity and the Demise of the Local
  • The Loss of Community Economic Power and Autonomy
  • Maryann Feldman, Martin Kenney
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • Capitalism is a powerful engine that requires finance. Private equity is part of the neoliberal transformation of capitalism that has failed the average citizen and unleashed a tsunami of leveraged acquisitions that have destroyed entire sectors of our economy. Private equity has become a powerful force that has moved from restructuring industrial firms to buying up just about any economic activity in local communities that has assets that can be monetized, without any consideration of the impact on the quality of life and well-being of the community. Th a process has been aided and abetted by government policy. The authors of this Element explain the workings of the private equity model and the reasons it has been so profitable. They document the effects of PE on firms and communities by examining a range of activities that once had a local focus. They conclude by offering policy recommendations.
Conceptualizing the History of the Present Time

Conceptualizing the History of the Present Time
  • María Inés Mudrovcic
  • Published online:
    03 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • In this work, I explore four meanings of 'contemporary,' emphasizing its designation as a historical field. I argue that disagreements about when the presento or the contemporary era begins stem from historians assuming a linear, chronological, and absolute conception of time. Following scholars like L. Descombes, L. Hölscher, B. Latour, D. J. Wilcox and S. Tanaka, I propose conceiving relational historical time without chronology, emphasizing the original sense of “sharing the same time” that 'contemporary' acquired for the first time. This perspective mitigates issues concerning the 'beginnings' or 'meaning' of the present. Emphasizing relationships within a relational time framework aids in overcoming ontological challenges like 'so many presents' or 'distance in time,' along with the corresponding epistemological issue of 'objectivity.' This exploration aims to reevaluate and enrich our understanding of the multifaceted concept of the 'present' in the context of history.
Towards Game Translation User Research

Towards Game Translation User Research
  • Mikołaj Deckert, Krzysztof W. Hejduk, Miguel Á. Bernal-Merino
  • Published online:
    02 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
  • This Element takes the initiative to highlight the nascent state of audiovisual translation research centring on users of video games. It proposes ways of advancing the research by integrating numerous related perspectives from relevant fields to guide studies in translated game reception into further fruition. The Element offers an accessible overview of possible relationships between translation and its experiencers, showcasing ways to design game reception studies. Examples, methods, tools, and practical concerns are discussed to ultimately develop a blueprint for game translation user research which aims to consolidate scientific user-centric inquiry into video game translation. To that end, the blueprint captures the three-pronged interplay between the parameters of localisation-reception research in facets of user experience, facets of translated games, and facets of game users.
Here and Now at Historic Sites

Here and Now at Historic Sites
  • Pupils and Guides Experiencing Heritage
  • David Ludvigsson, Martin Stolare, Cecilia Trenter
  • Published online:
    02 May 2024
    Print publication:
    23 May 2024
    • Element
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  • The study explores the meaning-making of cultural heritage in school field trips to five sites in the region Östergötland in Sweden. It treats the materiality of the place and experiences of the guides and the pupils, obtained in school as well as in other contexts, as meaning-making resources during the site visits. It emphasises that sites should be seen as processes, open to interpretations and reinterpretations. The visitor is steered by expectations and common values as well as by the ways in which the heritage site is displayed and presented. In the present study, both adults (guides) and children (pupils) are defined as visitors. The authors draw on theories from history education research and from heritage studies when interpreting how pupils encounter heritage sites, they underline the centrality of 'the flesh and embodied agency' in the experience of sites. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Knowledge and God

Knowledge and God
  • Matthew A. Benton
  • Published online:
    01 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This Element examines a main theme in religious epistemology, namely, the possibility of knowledge of God. Most often philosophers consider the rationality or justification of propositional belief about God, particularly beliefs about the existence and nature of God; and they will assess the conditions under which, if there is a God, such propositional beliefs would be knowledge, particularly in light of counter-evidence or the availability of religious disagreement. This Element surveys such familiar areas, then turns toward newer and less-developed terrain: interpersonal epistemology, namely what it is to know another person. It then explores the prospects for understanding what it might take to know God relationally, the contours of which are significant for many theistic traditions.
Assessment for Language Teaching

Assessment for Language Teaching
  • Aek Phakiti, Constant Leung
  • Published online:
    01 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This Element reviews the key foundational concepts, beliefs, and practices underpinning approaches to assessment in English Language Teaching. Exploring major concepts and practices through educational, social, and ethical perspectives, it offers theoretically informed and close-to-practice descriptions and up-to-date explanations of the affordances and limitations of different assessment approaches related to language teaching. This Element presents a cohesive and pragmatic framework that allows teachers to efficiently implement tests and assessments in their contexts.
Costly Opportunities

Costly Opportunities
  • Social Mobility in Segregated Societies
  • María José Álvarez-Rivadulla
  • Published online:
    01 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • This Element investigates entrenched inequality in Latin America through a unique case of class integration in Colombian higher education. Examining a forgivable loan program benefiting 40,000 high-achieving individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, the Element introduces 'gate opening' and 'diversified networks' as mechanisms countering traditional inequality reproduction. Utilizing a longitudinal, ethnographic approach, it explores the evolving process of social mobility within an elite school, emphasizing subjective experiences and challenges. Despite educational gaps and stark social differences, most students formed cross-class friendships, completed their education, and achieved higher socioeconomic positions. Yet, in so doing they had to face several costs of social mobility resourcing to strategies such as camouflaging or disclosing, sometimes becoming culturally omnivourous in the end. The significance of a prestigious degree varies based on the professional labor market, with first-generation students facing more challenges in low quality or elitist markets where cultural and social capital act as entry barriers.

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