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With his debut album Original Pirate Material (2002), Mike Skinner, who recorded under the name The Streets, combined the world of UK dance music with US hip-hop. Original Pirate Material is the result of the so-called 'bedroom producer', hybridizing previous forms into something novel. This Element explores a number of themes in this album: white masculinity, the everyday, technology, sampling, hybridity, the Black Atlantic, and US-UK transatlantic relations. It examines the exoticism of Englishness from a US perspective as well as within the wider context of Anglo-American cross influence in post-WWII popular music. Twenty years since the album's release, this Element provides an investigation of the album's content and reception, as an important case study of (postcolonial) hybridity and (English, male) identity.
Radical democracy informs contemporary social movements both as critique of existing liberal democratic social orders and as inspiration for collective action to challenge power structures. However, existing approaches on the relationship between radical democracy and social movements often truncate complex socio-political issues, constraining political imagination and stifling 'truly radical' alternatives. This Element offers an analysis of contemporary social movements in Colombia and Turkey to show the limits and potential of radical democracy to reimagine new expressions of citizenship and non-capitalist alternatives. It argues that there is a mismatch between the radical democratic paradigm as it is formulated within Eurocentric purview, and the ways it has been articulated and practised by anti-austerity and pro-democracy movements of the twenty-first century. We propose that radical democracy should be rethought in light of novel forms of political activism and visions emerging from these social movements as a response to the failures of liberal democracy.
New Religious Movements have arisen not only in the present but have also developed in the past. While they differ in ideology and practice, they generally seem to live in high tension with mainstream society, especially when it comes to child-rearing. This Element examines several aspects of children growing up in new religions. It relies upon literature from different groups concerning child upbringing, the function of children in the groups considering the religious ideologies, and parental perspectives and parental styles. It also utilizes accounts from young adults growing up in these groups, both those who chose to stay and who chose to leave their groups as adults. A range of topics, such as socialization, education, health care, and relations to surrounding society are explored. In addition, this Element considers issues of physical and emotional abuse, state interventions, and the impact of second- and third generations of children in new religions.
This Element is an interdisciplinary analysis of the language evidence produced before, during and following a lone-actor terrorism attack in Halle, Germany, on October 9, 2019, resulting in two casualties. During his final preparations, the perpetrator, twenty-seven-year-old Stephan Balliet, announced his attack online and disseminated a targeted violence manifesto shortly before live-streaming his violent act. This post-hoc investigation introduces a multi-method approach that synchronizes well-established qualitative methodologies for forensic text analysis – genre, text linguistics, appraisal and uptake – to elucidate these data types. Furthermore, a retroactive threat assessment based on language data from the trial transcripts provides a holistic review of the assailant's background, red flags, triggering events and warning behaviors that could have signaled his movements along the pathway to violence. The results are considered in an organizational context to highlight current challenges faced by security agencies when mitigating the risk of lone-actors who radicalize in online environments.
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.