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This Element focuses on how narrative is used to construct religious identity in superdiverse contexts, considering specifically how people talk about their own religious identity, and the religious identity of others. Drawing on interviews with twenty-five participants, and numerous site visits throughout the city of Birmingham (UK), the analysis focuses on how self and other positioning is used to construct religious identity in talk about beliefs, actions, and behaviours in different contexts. Additionally, the analysis shows how conflict emerges and is resolved in spaces where people of different faiths and no faith interact, and how people talk about and understand community. Finally, a model for talking about faith in diverse contexts is presented to help people find common goals and act together towards shared interests.
This Element explores the relation between monotheism and fundamentalism. It does so from both an empirical perspective and a more theoretical one that combines theological and philosophical insights. The empirical part addresses how as a matter of fact, particularly quantitively, monotheism and fundamentalism relate to one another. The more theoretical part studies the relation between the two by considering the doctrine of God and the issue of exclusion, theories of revelation, and ethics. Finally, the book considers whether monotheism has particular resources that can be employed in mitigating the consequences of or even altogether preventing fundamentalism. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Contemporary thought typically places a strong emphasis on the exclusive and competitive nature of Abrahamic monotheisms. This instinct is certainly borne out by the histories of religious wars, theological polemic, and social exclusion involving Jews, Christians, and Muslims. But there is also another side to the Abrahamic coin. Even in the midst of communal rivalry, Jews, Christians, and Muslim practitioners have frequently turned to each other to think through religious concepts, elucidate sacred history, and enrich their ritual practices. Scholarship often describes these interactions between the Abrahamic monotheisms using metaphors of exchange between individuals-as if one tradition might borrow a theological idea from another in the same way that a neighbor might borrow a recipe. This Element proposes that there are deeper forms of entanglement at work in these historical moments.
Disability and Healing in Greek and Roman Myth takes its readers to stories, in versions known and often unknown. Disabilities and diseases are dealt with from head to toe: from mental disorder, over impairment of vision, hearing and speaking, to mobility problems and wider issues that pertain to the whole body. This Element places the stories in context, with due attention to close reading, and pays careful attention to concepts and terminology regarding disability. It sets Graeco-Roman mythology in the wider context of the ancient world, including Christianity. One of the focuses is the people behind the stories and their 'lived' religion. It also encourages its readers to 'live' their ancient mythology.
The human ability to effortlessly understand the actions of other people has been the focus of research in cognitive neuroscience for decades. What have we learned about this ability, and what open questions remain? In this Element the authors address these questions by considering the kinds of information an observer may gain when viewing an action. A 'what, how, and why' framing organises evidence and theories about the representations that support classifying an action; how the way an action is performed supports observational learning and inferences about other people; and how an actor's intentions are inferred from her actions. Further evidence shows how brain systems support action understanding, from research inspired by 'mirror neurons' and related concepts. Understanding actions from vision is a multi-faceted process that serves many behavioural goals, and is served by diverse mechanisms and brain systems.
This Element offers a review and synthesis of the theoretical analysis of mixed oligopoly, that is a hybrid market structure in which public (state-owned) and private firms interact, using a variety of strategic variables. A distinguishing feature of a mixed oligopoly is that firms have different objectives. A public firm's objective is a notion of social welfare while a private firm is profit maximising. Privatisation and partial-privatisation of a public firm is also discussed, together with several applications from diverse subfields spanning industrial organisation, applied microeconomic theory, innovation, international trade and environment policy. The authors also discuss ways in which the original analysis has been enriched to study the interaction between providers of public sector services as opposed to traditional goods.
This Element considers health misinformation and the problems it presents. The evolving communication context—changing doctor-patient relationships and developments in information technology—presents patients with a vastly enriched information landscape and new challenges to patients navigating it. These challenges are magnified as growing patient empowerment and autonomy have increased expectations for patient involvement in medical decisions. In this context, the ways people approach presented information, learn from it, understand it, and use it, exacerbate the risk that they become misinformed—believing things that are inimical to improved health. Moreover, these same processes make it difficult to correct such beliefs. Approaches building on trust between patient and professional exemplify improved communication to increase accurate patient knowledge and understanding in the service of better health. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Emergency Neurosurgery is a constantly evolving specialty, resulting in ever increasing challenges posed on the higher specialty trainee. The focus of this Element is to guide the reader on the application of robust and easily applicable management strategies whilst dealing with the most challenging aspects of their professional workload. The authors have categorised the various subgroups of emergency neurosurgical workload, devised a comprehensive management algorithm, included case scenaria related to the most challenging emergency situations and highlighted easily overlooked clinical information. In summary, this Element will provide robust and easily applicable management strategies whilst dealing with the most challenging aspects of the emergency neurosurgical workload.
This Element offers a comprehensive examination of forensic linguistics in China. It traces the origins of the field in the 1980s and 1990s, and highlights the progress made in the 2000s, with a focus on the work of influential scholars such as Pan Qingyun, Wang Jie, Du Jinbang, Liao Meizhen, Yuan Chuanyou, and Wang Zhenhua. It discusses the development of Discourse Information Theory, the Principle of Goal, Functional Forensic Discourse Analysis, and Legal Discourse as a Social Process. It also analyses studies on language evidence and explores legal translation. It discusses emerging research areas, including cyberbullying language research, internet court discourse analysis, authorship analysis, expert assistance systems, and speaker identification and evidence of forensic phonetics. This Element provides valuable insights into the growth and potential of forensic linguistics in China, serving as a comprehensive resource for scholars, researchers, and practitioners interested in the intersection of language and law.
The overriding question discussed in this Element can be stated simply as: can computers create art? This Element presents an overview of the controversies raised by various answers to this question. A major difficulty is that the technology is developing rapidly, and there are still many uncertainties and knowledge gaps as to what is possible today and in the near future. But a number of controversial issues are identified and discussed. The position taken on controversial issues will depend on assumptions made about the technology, about the nature and location of consciousness, about art and creativity. Therefore, a number of hypothetical answers are outlined, related to the assumptions made.
Why do we see large-scale labor protests and strikes under some IMF programs such as in Greece in 2010 and not in others such as in Ireland in the same year? This Element argues that extensive labor market reform conditions in an immobile labor market generate strong opposition to programs. Labor market reform conditions that decentralize and open up an immobile labor market cause workers either to lose in terms of rights and benefits, while being stuck in the same job or to fall into a less protected sector with fewer benefits. Conversely, in more mobile labor markets, wage and benefit differentials are low, and movement across sectors is easier. In such markets, labor groups do not mobilize to the same extent to block programs. The author tests this theory in a global sample and explores the causal mechanism in four case studies on Greece, Ireland, Latvia, and Portugal.
The immense outpouring of archaeological discoveries this past century has shed new light on ancient East Asia, and China in particular. Yet in concert with this development another, more troubling, trend has likewise gained momentum: the looting of cultural heritage and the sale of unprovenienced antiquities. Scholars face difficult questions, from the ethics of working with objects of unknown provenance, to the methodological problems inherent in their research. The goal of this Element is to encourage scholars to critically examine their relationships to their sources and reflect upon the impact of their research. The three essays in this Element present a range of disciplinary perspectives, focusing on systemic issues and the nuances of method versus ethics, with a case study of the so-called 'Han board' MSS given as a specific illustration. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Based on real experiences of teaching Shakespeare in diverse classrooms and outreach programmes, this Element questions the role of authority in Shakespeare teaching. It connects an understanding of how Shakespearean texts function with critical thinking about teaching, especially derived from the work of Jaques Rancière. Certain elements of the Shakespearean text - notably how it was intended to teach its first readers, the actors, and its uses of dramatic irony - are revealed as already containing possibilities for more decentred forms of knowledge production.
This Element describes and synthesizes archaeological knowledge of humankind's first cities for the purpose of strengthening a comparative understanding of urbanism across space and time. Case studies are drawn from ancient Mesopotamia, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They cover over 9000 years of city building. Cases exemplify the 'deep history' of urbanism in the classic heartlands of civilization, as well as lesser-known urban phenomena in other areas and time periods. The Element discusses the relevance of this knowledge to a number of contemporary urban challenges around food security, service provision, housing, ethnic co-existence, governance, and sustainability. This study seeks to enrich scholarly debates about the urban condition, and inspire new ideas for urban policy, planning, and placemaking in the twenty first century.
How do polycentric governance systems respond to new collective action problems? This Element tackles this question by studying the governance of adaptation to sea level rise in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Like climate mitigation, climate adaptation has public good characteristics and therefore poses collective action problems of coordination and cooperation. The Element brings together the literature on adaptation planning with the Ecology of Games framework, a theory of polycentricity combining rational choice institutionalism with social network theory, to investigate how policy actors address the collective action problems of climate adaptation: the key barriers to coordination they perceive, the collaborative relationships they form, and their assessment of the quality of the cooperation process in the policy forums they attend. Using both qualitative and quantitative data and analysis, the Element finds that polycentric governance systems can address coordination problems by fostering the emergence of leaders who reduce transaction and information costs. Polycentric systems, however, struggle to address issues of inequality and redistribution.
The biological world is full of phenomena that seem to run counter to Darwin's insight that natural selection can lead to the appearance of design. For instance, why do organisms in some species divide reproductive labor? The existence of non-reproducing organisms in such 'eusocial' species looks to be at odds with an evolutionary theory which posits traits exist because they help organisms survive and reproduce. What is the evolutionary advantage of an insect being distasteful to its predators? The distastefulness appears designed to deter predators, but can only affect the predator's actions when the insect is eaten; it is hard to see how such a trait could be passed on. This Element will cover the shared foundations of evolutionary explanations for these and other seemingly puzzling phenomena, focusing on the concepts of inclusive fitness and kin selection.
This Element explores the role of pragmatics, and its relationship with meaning and grammar, in second language acquisition. Specifically, this Element examines the generative paradigm, with its focus on purely linguistic aspects, in contrast with, and complemented by, the view of language adopted in the wider perspective on communication that Relevance Theory offers. It reviews several theoretical standpoints on how linguistic phenomena that require combining semantic, pragmatic and syntactic information are acquired and developed in second languages, illustrating how these perspectives are brought together in analysing data in different linguistic scenarios. It shows that the notion of procedural meaning casts light on the range of interpretative effects of grammatical features and how they vary across languages, suggesting ways to complete the picture of the interface factors that affect second language development.
The January 6, 2021 invasion of the US Capitol building by a mob trying to block certification of Biden's victory attacked a bedrock principle of American democracy, the peaceful transfer of power following an election. This Element reviews how the pubic evaluated the invaders, their actions, Donald Trump's responsibility, and the House investigations as they evolved after January 6. It then analyzes these reactions in the broader context of contemporary American politics and considers the consequences of January 6 for the 2022 election, the Republican coalition, polarization, Trump's indictments, electoral politics in 2024, and the future health of American democracy.
Mathematical pluralism is the view that there is an irreducible plurality of pure mathematical structures, each with their own internal logics; and that qua pure mathematical structures they are all equally legitimate. Mathematical pluralism is a relatively new position on the philosophical landscape. This Element provides an introduction to the position.
The Atlantic World was an oceanic system circulating goods, people, and ideas that emerged in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. European imperialism was its motor, while its character derived from the interactions between peoples indigenous to Europe, the Americas, and Africa. Much of the everyday workings of this oceanic system took place in urban settings. By sustaining the connections between these disparate regions, cities and towns became essential to the transformations that occurred in this early modern era. This Element, traces the emergence of the Atlantic city as a site of contact, an agent of colonization, a central node in networks of exchange, and an arena of political contestation. Cities of the Atlantic World operated at the juncture of many of the core processes in a global history of capitalism and of rising social and racial inequality. A source of analogous experiences of division as well as unity, they helped shape the Atlantic world as a coherent geography of analysis.