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This Element offers a critical exploration of institutional health communication in an era marked by information overload and uneven content quality. It examines how health institutions can navigate the challenges of false, misleading, and poor-quality health information while preserving public trust and scientific integrity. Drawing from disciplines such as health communication, behavioral science, media studies, and rhetoric, this Element promotes participatory models, transparent messaging, and critical health literacy. Through a series of thematic sections and practical examples, it addresses the role of science, politics, media, and digital influencers in shaping public understanding. Designed as both a conceptual guide and a strategic toolkit, this Element aims to support institutions in fostering informed, engaged, and resilient communities through communication that is clear, ethical, and responsive to the complexities of today's health discourse. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
It is difficult to name a question more contentious than the question of credentialing for academic librarians. This study attempts three things. First, to understand how today's US research libraries approach credentialing and hiring. Which assumptions, practices, and arguments for those practices do they make? The Element evaluates those practices and rationale both quantitatively-How many people adopt which positions and practices based on which assumptions?-and qualitatively-How compelling are the arguments for their respective positions? The qualitative element feeds into this essay's second effort: to argue, based on evidence offered, that more traditional and restrictive practices hamper and hobble the profession. The third section-derived from follow-up interviews with deans at thirty-two libraries with liberalized credentialing and hiring practices-chronicles and draws lessons from libraries at the forefront of reform, and then offers advice to libraries examining their own hiring practices. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element's contribution explores the historiography of madness in the Modern era, including landmark publications in the overlapping fields of the history of psychiatry and the history of lunatic asylums. As this examination of almost 200 academic works will demonstrate, the field is vast and highly contested, with researchers sometimes disagreeing about the basic terms of analysis. Nevertheless, from Foucault to Fanon, from Goffman to Gilman, these debates about social and medical responses to madness have inspired some of the most influential academic scholarship of the twentieth century. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
While bribery has been extensively studied, the dynamics of personnel corruption in the public sector, often known as 'buying and selling of government offices,' remain underexplored. This form of corruption involves leaders' accepting or soliciting bribes from subordinates to influence recruitment, appointment, and promotion decisions, significantly impacting political selection and governance quality. This Element employs a dual perspective – corruption and elite mobility – to analyze the distribution of office-selling across the Chinese administrative matrix and its various forms and implications. Using two novel self-compiled datasets, it proposes a tripartite framework of performance, patronage, and purchase to reimagine political selection in China, highlighting the coexistence of multiple governance models: a meritocratic state prioritizing competence, a clientelist state emphasizing loyalty, and an investment state bound by money. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element maps the relationship between taxation and social policy from a comparative and historical perspective. It critically reviews studies in fiscal sociology, history, political science and political economy to highlight blind spots in the body of knowledge that future studies could explore. It shows that exploring the revenue side of social policy offers compelling answers to central questions tackled in welfare state scholarship and addresses questions such as: What explains the introduction and timing of social programs? How can we understand processes of welfare state expansion and retrenchment? What determines the redistributive capacity of welfare states? What accounts for variations in redistributive capacity between groups and across generations in different countries? While bringing in the financing side of social policy complements prevailing accounts in the welfare state literature, studying financing can also transform how we understand social policy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element addresses the illiberal challenge facing public administration amidst the rise of authoritarian populism and democratic backsliding. It investigates how populist governments seek to reshape state bureaucracies, often undermining liberal democratic principles such as pluralism, expertise, and constitutional safeguards, and examines how public administration must respond to safeguard democratic integrity. Drawing on global examples, the Element identifies strategies of populist administrative manipulation, patterns of bureaucratic compliance and resistance, and critical gaps in scholarly understanding. It develops a framework for analyzing these dynamics and proposes normative principles to defend active democratic bureaucracy. Through theoretical inquiry and practical recommendations, it advocates for robust, ethically grounded public administration capable of countering illiberal pressures. Its central thesis underscores the need to restore the intellectual foundation of public administration as a social science deeply embedded in and committed to the democratic policy process. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The number of international human rights institutions and countries participating in them has risen dramatically in recent decades, precipitating debates about why countries make such commitments and whether these commitments improve member's human rights behavior. These debates have centered on a small number of human rights treaties, with far less attention paid to the larger number of international organizations (IOs) that aim to promote human rights. The Element argues and then demonstrates that state decisions about joining these IOs depends on the institutional design of the organizations, specifically sovereignty costs for member states. These costs stem from the constraints that IOs impose and vary substantially. Emerging democracies are most likely to enter high sovereignty cost IOs. Furthermore, organizations that generate higher sovereignty costs tend to produce better human rights outcomes than those generating fewer sovereignty costs for all regimes. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Generative AI is becoming an integral part of children's lives, ranging from voice assistants and social robots to AI-generated storybooks. As children increasingly interact with these technologies, it is essential to consider their implications for developmental outcomes. This Element examines these implications across three interconnected domains: interaction, perception, and learning. A recurring theme across these domains is that children's engagement with AI both parallels and diverges from their engagement with humans, positioning AI as a distinct yet potentially complementary source of experience, enrichment, and knowledge. Ultimately, the Element advances a framework for understanding the complex interplay among technology, children, and the social contexts that shape their development.
Humanity in the twenty-first century faces serious global challenges and crises, including pandemics, nuclear proliferation, violent extremism, refugee migration, and climate change. None of these calamities can be averted without robust international cooperation. Yet, national leaders often assume that because their states are sovereign under international law, they are free to opt in or out of international cooperation as they see fit. This book challenges conventional wisdom by showing that international law requires states to cooperate with one another to address matters of international concern-even in the absence of treaty-based obligations. Within the past several decades, requirements to cooperate have become firmly embedded in the international legal regimes governing oceans, transboundary rivers, disputed territories, pollution, international security, and human rights, among other topics. Whenever states address matters of common concern, international law requires that they work together as good neighbors for their mutual benefit. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Drawing on a decade of research and more than 580 interviews, this innovative political economy case study explores Rwanda's bold attempt to transform its economy after the 1994 genocide into one of the most rapidly growing countries in Africa. Pritish Behuria offers a multi-sector analysis of how globalisation and domestic politics shape contemporary development challenges. This study critically analyses the Rwandan Patriotic Front's ambitions to reshape Rwanda into a regional services hub while grappling with foreign dependency, elite vulnerability and limited financial resources. Through extensive analysis of the political economy of multiple sectors and the macro-economy, Behuria uses the Rwandan case as a window into answering why structural transformation remains so elusive on the continent. The Political Economy of Rwanda's Rise provides fresh insights into highlighting the contemporary challenges facing African countries as they integrate into the global economy. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Investigates the 2016 installation of Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe language) toponym signs throughout the White Earth Reservation, reflecting an ongoing tradition of Ojibwe linguistic preservation rooted in environmental knowledge of waters. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with White Earth citizens, descendants, and personnel, this work addresses how these public markers make Anishinaabemowin visible in the world for Ojibwe youth and other White Earth Anishinaabeg, while marking the reservation as an Ojibwe space. These place name signs, along with youth language programs, intervene in the legacy of imposed language loss of Anishinaabemowin on the White Earth Reservation caused by mission, day, and boarding schools. Examines Ojibwe people's intergenerational efforts to document place names, responses to these signs, and how they relate to toponymic authority and spatial belonging. Focuses on historic and contemporary stories of Ojibwe geographic relationships grounded in fishing, hunting, ricing, and gathering within and surrounding Gaa-waabaabiganikaag. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
One of the most significant innovations in international industrial organization over the past half-century has been the vertical disintegration of production, with different stages carried out in different countries-a process widely known as the Global Manufacturing Value Chain (GMVC). Trade based on global production sharing within GMVC has been the primary driver behind the dramatic shift in world manufacturing exports from developed to developing countries. However, there are growing concerns in policy circles about whether the GMVC is beginning to lose momentum. This study examines this issue with reference to Southeast Asian countries, which serve as an ideal laboratory for such an analysis. Engagement in GMVC has played a major role in the economic dynamism of these countries, although their levels of participation vary significantly. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
From artificial intelligence (AI) to quantum computing, every new technology is surrounded by 'hype' – but what exactly is hype, and how does it work? This is the first book to take hype seriously, showing how it is made, managed, and mobilised across today's innovation landscapes. Far from being just empty talk, hype has become a structured practice and even a business in its own right. The authors uncover the machinery that drives markets, guides innovation, and shapes whole promissory economies. They also initiate 'Hype Studies' – a new way of understanding how innovation unfolds in the digital age and beyond. After Hype not only establishes hype as a serious object of study but also reveals it to be one of the most powerful yet overlooked forces shaping and influencing our technological future. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Eight United Nations human rights treaty bodies (UNTBs) can currently examine 'communications' (complaints) from individuals against states. This edited collection is the first in-depth analysis of the evidentiary regimes developed within this procedure. Nine case studies underscore the weak evidentiary basis of the UNTB decisions and the importance of addressing this issue, while the final chapter offers a set of practical recommendations. Grounded in academic research and legal practice, the volume incorporates doctrinal, critical, socio-legal, and anthropological perspectives. It provides an authoritative reference on UNTBs, whilst aiming at contributing to the strengthening of their evidentiary norms and practices. The title is also available open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element critically examines the claim that United States economic sanctions on Venezuela constituted 'collective punishment' of the Venezuelan population, contributing significantly to the country's economic collapse and humanitarian crisis. Through comprehensive analysis of economic, developmental, and welfare indicators from 2013 to 2023, it demonstrates that the bulk of Venezuela's economic devastation - including 52 percent of GDP losses and 98 percent of import declines - largely occurred before financial sanctions were imposed in August 2017. Key welfare indicators such as infant mortality, undernourishment, and life expectancy had deteriorated substantially by 2017 and subsequently stabilized or improved following sanctions implementation, contradicting narratives that attribute Venezuela's collapse primarily to external economic pressure. The Element provides a timeline of Venezuelan economic and political events around sanctions and a critical review of the literature on their economic effects. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Element examines various facets of craftwork in small-scale societies that thrived in much of Central Europe during the Bronze Age (2300–800 BCE). These societies exhibited distinct structures and types of social bonds that formed the social and spatial backdrop for craft practices. Since most Bronze Age villages were inhabited by small groups, all forms of crafting were at least partially communal, fostering the exchange of experiences, skills, and knowledge both within and across different production areas. The public nature of crafting practices also encouraged discussions about applied tools, methods, skills, and the quality of the final products. The author explores overarching questions about communication and knowledge transfer within and beyond small groups, drawing on archaeological and ethnographic data. This includes considerations of standardization, personalization, imitation, seasonality, and cross-crafting. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Muslim Theological Encounters with Science dismantles the 'Islamic decline' narrative by showing how science and theology have long coexisted in Muslim civilization. Premodern thinkers navigated enduring tensions between reason and revelation, ensuring that intellectual disagreement fostered growth rather than hostility. Modern friction between science and Muslim theology-driven by colonialism, limited scientific literacy, and the absence of a science-attuned common sense among theologians-has often, though not exclusively, stemmed from adherence to outdated theological models. The author proposes a 'symphonic and braided' framework for relating science and theology, treating them as distinct yet complementary languages of meaning-making. Cultivating humility and imagination emerges as essential to human understanding. By avoiding the trap of forced convergence, this framework allows science to explain the 'how' while theology addresses the 'why,' together weaving a more complex and resilient pursuit of the truth. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Addressing the active and challenging field of spectral theory, this book develops the general theory of spectra of discrete structures, on graphs, simplicial complexes, and hypergraphs. In fact, hypergraphs have long been neglected in mathematical research, but because of the discovery of Laplace operators that can probe their structure, and their manifold applications from chemical reaction networks to social interactions, they have now become one of the most active areas of interdisciplinary research. The authors' analysis of spectra of discrete structures embeds intuitive and easily visualized examples, which are often quite subtle, within a general mathematical framework. They highlight novel research on Cheeger-type inequalities that connect spectral estimates with the geometry, more precisely the cohesion, of the underlying structure. Establishing mathematical foundations and demonstrating applications, this book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in mathematics working on the spectral theory of operators on discrete structures.
Dialogue is often understood as the verbal interaction between different people or groups. This Element reconceptualises dialogue through dance and somatic practices, foregrounding sensory relationality and responsiveness to the environment. Rather than centring conflict between specific 'actors', it evolves a framework for dialogue as a holistic system of embodied exchange. This Element focuses on Amerta Movement – a free-form style of dance developed by Javanese dance artist Suprapto Suryodarmo (Prapto) through transcultural practice – to explore how movement facilitates dialogue with oneself, the environment, other people, and wider communities. Drawing on fieldwork and practice in Indonesia, the authors analyse the work of seven performing artists who engage with Amerta Movement in their workshops and performances. This Element considers how such movement practices cultivate conditions for interreligious and intercultural dialogue, while contributing to debates on social cohesion and social justice. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.