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This Element interrogates the complex role of gender in shaping the sociolinguistic variable of UPTALK within Hong Kong English, highlighting its interaction with other sociodemographic factors. Foregrounding gender as a central factor, the Element employs a robust array of methodologies to dissect how gender interacts with social factors, identities, and social types across a sample of sixteen participants. Findings unveil new perspectives on gender-dependent meanings of UPTALK, demonstrating that while gendered stylistic accommodation plays a notable role, UPTALK is not merely a gender marker. Instead, it embodies complex social meanings shaped by a broad spectrum of individual, cognitive (awareness), and contextual factors. By integrating both production and perception/attitudinal data from a relatively unexplored context, the Element provides a holistic, nuanced understanding of how UPTALK can function as a multifunctional sociolinguistic resource, offering insights into the theorization of language variation and social meaning, with particular focus on the role of gender.
Sustainability matters increasingly affect and concern central banks around the globe, while the perception of what they are legally empowered to do may differ depending on the jurisdiction at hand. This volume systematically assesses the role of central banks in matters of sustainability from different perspectives in academia and central banking practice – some more favourable of a proactive engagement of central banks in sustainability policies, others more critical and vigilant of legal and legitimacy boundaries of such engagement. The methodological approaches the authors deploy include legal-doctrinal analysis, qualitative empirical analysis, and economic theory. The essays together provide a balanced assessment of the role central banks can and should play in sustainability matters, addressing legal aspects, legitimacy concerns, and concerns of interinstitutional balance as well as economic and operational considerations. The book covers both developed and developing economies, where central banks are already facing the dire consequences of the warming climate.
Electronic dance music is increasingly the focus of a multitude of academic research projects around the world but has been drastically under-represented in accessible core published material. This innovative scholarly collection provides an important 'first stop' for researchers and students wishing to work in this area. It examines the key features of numerous electronic dance music scenes and (sub)genres alongside discussions of the musical, social and aesthetic experiences of participants to consider how these musical practices create purpose and cultural significance for millions around the world. At the same time, it introduces diverse theoretical approaches to the understanding of electronic dance music cultures and addresses the issues and debates in electronic dance music culture studies. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach drawn from both music and cultural studies – including music aesthetics, technologies, venues, and performativity – from a broad geographical perspective, the volume sheds fresh light on electronic dance music cultures.
'Humanism' is among the most powerful terms in historical and contemporary political, religious, and philosophical debates. The term serves to position itself in ideological conflicts and to cement a claim to interpretation, but is highly contradictory. This Element addresses 'humanism' in its striking contradictions. Contemporary definitions are confronted with the historical contexts the term 'humanism' is applied to. Based on Niethammer's invention of 'humanism' as an anti-enlightenment pedagogical concept (1808), the book does not present a mere conceptual history, but rather a theoretically oriented discourse, an examination of the front positions, between which humanism has been constructed. In this way, its 'impossibility' is shown, which is rooted in its strict contextuality. Secondly, historiographical alternatives to this dilemma are pointed out, in order to finally give suggestions not only for an ethical-normative work of the historian of humanism, but for dealing with 'humanism' in general, in connection with discourse-theoretical suggestions. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Autonomy is one of the central aspirations of our time, yet there is a growing worry that autonomy, as we have understood and practised it, has not liberated us but subjected us to new forms of domination. In his ground-breaking reinterpretation of Kant and Hegel, Thomas Khurana reveals the source of these problems in the very concept of autonomy and develops a new understanding of human self-determination. While the dominant conception of autonomy gives rise to the paradox of self-legislation and remains caught up in a dualistic opposition of freedom and nature, we can overcome these problems by understanding freedom as a form of life. Elaborating both Kant's and Hegel's compelling concepts of life, Khurana shows that we are not autonomous despite or against our living nature, but by inhabiting it in the right way. To understand freedom, we need a critical theory of our second nature.
Tens of thousands of mostly younger Black people went to rural Louisiana in 2007 to support the Jena 6, Black students who were overcharged after a school fight. We examine the construction of two narratives. The powerful Jena 6 narrative told how the conflict began when nooses were hung on the school grounds, linking historic racial violence to modern injustice. This narrative emphasized student agency and downplayed documented adult actions. A second narrative about organizing the campaign incorrectly said that existing organizations had ignored the case. We use published sources to trace the ordinary processes as activists, journalists, and organizations became involved in the campaign through three phases – regional organizing, nationalization, scale shift to cascade. In the last phase, many saw this as a historic reinvigoration of the Black movement. Circulating narratives inspired participation by stressing youthful agency and spontaneity. More accurate accounts are better for theory and action.
Our breathtaking intelligence is embodied in our skills. Think of Olympic gymnastics, and the amount of strength and control required to perform even a simple beam routine; think of a carpenter skillfully carving the wood, where complicated techniques come across as sheer easiness of the bodily movements; of a pianist performing a sonata, balancing technical virtuosity with elegance. Throughout our lifetimes, we acquire and refine a vast number of skills, and the improvement and refinement of skills are not bound to the human lifespan alone either: somehow, they also cross generations. Skills both foster cultural evolution and are refined by it – for example, in the way cultural evolution perfects tools and building techniques. What makes skills possible? And how can skills explain our successes? This book is the first systematic discussion of skills: of their nature, and of their relation to knowledge and reasoning.
The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1796) was the final novel that Ann Radcliffe published in her lifetime. With her monumental The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), it is widely considered her finest work – a nearly perfect combination of suspense, romance, social critique, and deep psychology. Set in Naples in the decades before the French Revolution, it chronicles the adventures of two lovers, Ellena di Rosalba and Vincentio di Vivaldi, whose intended marriage provokes the ire not just of Vivaldi's powerful parents, but also of the Holy Inquisition. Since its first publication, readers have admired The Italian's sharply drawn characters, evocative landscapes, brilliantly constructed plot, and unrivalled atmospherics. Arguably no other Romantic novelist has depicted the human capacity for evil so palpably while providing such a range of beauties for readers to savour. This edition presents the definitive text along with a full introduction and explanatory notes.
Telling one's own story has always been central to American gay culture. Yet until now there has been no extensive history of gay American autobiography. This volume provides the first comprehensive study of this crucial genre in all its complexity and diversity. Its lively and insightful analyses of a wealth of gay American autobiographical texts attend both to their historical significance and to the qualities that make them worth reading. Covering works produced over the past 200 years, the book vividly conveys how the identities of same-sex-attracted men have shifted over time and intersected with class, race, ethnicity, and occupation. Taken together, the essays in this volume demonstrate how gay life writing has contributed invaluably to the historical struggles against the subordination and persecution of same-sex sexuality and to its establishment as a legitimate form of self-expression.
This comprehensive reference brings readers to the frontier of research on bandit convex optimization or zeroth-order convex optimization. The focus is on theoretical aspects, with short, self-contained chapters covering all the necessary tools from convex optimization and online learning, including gradient-based algorithms, interior point methods, cutting plane methods and information-theoretic machinery. The book features a large number of exercises, open problems and pointers to future research directions, making it ideal for students as well as researchers.
Empirical Legal Studies has arrived in EU law. The past decade has seen the publication of pathbreaking quantitative and qualitative studies, the creation of relevant thematic networks, and the realisation of large-scale empirical research projects. This volume explores the new movement. It features contributions penned by legal and political science scholars working or interested in the field. It is part handbook, for which scholars – experts and novices alike – can reach to get an overview of the state of the art. It is part manifesto, showcasing the need for and potential of this fast-growing area of academic inquiry. Finally, it is a critical reflection, assessing the challenges and limitations of Empirical Legal Studies in the EU context, as well as its interaction with adjacent disciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavours. The book captures the significant contribution which empirical legal research has made to the study of EU law, while facilitating an exchange about the way forward.
Order, Authority, Nation develops a sociological account of political conversion from left to right through an examination of the historical case of Marcel Déat and the French neo-socialists. Déat and the neo-socialists began their careers in the 1920s as democratic socialists but became fascists and Nazi collaborators by the end of World War II. While existing accounts of this shift emphasize the ideological continuity underlying neo-socialism and fascism, this book centers the fundamentally discontinuous and relational character of political conversion in its analysis. Highlighting the active part played by Déat and the neo-socialists in their own reinvention at different moments of their trajectory, it argues that political conversion is a phenomenon defined not just by a change in belief, but at its core, by how political actors respond to changing political circumstances. This sociological account of a phenomenon often treated polemically offers a unique contribution to the sociology and history of socialism and fascism.
Southern Min – the most commonly spoken variant of Taiwanese – has over 100 million speakers. This book provides the first comprehensive analysis of Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) phonology, filling a critical gap in linguistic research. It demonstrates how the language's sound patterns have evolved over time, and explores its key phonological and tonal features. Beginning with an overview of the language's phonological system, it progresses to specialized topics, including segmental and tonal mutations, tonal domains, and metrical structures. Grounded in three purpose-built corpora, it integrates empirical data and statistical analyses to illuminate phonological processes and patterns. It also explores rarely addressed topics, including phonological interfaces, the rhythms of poetry and folk ballads, and the iGeneration dialectal variety, providing analytical clarity on complex phenomena. Serving as both a detailed reference for researchers and a supplementary text for phonology and Asian linguistics courses, its illuminating insights will inspire further research into this intricate linguistic system.
From large-scale quantitative studies in the digital humanities to AI-generated poetry, scientific reading seemingly reigns supreme. However, these reading practices preceded, and often shaped, modern literary criticism and the rise of close reading. The Search for a Science of Verse restores this history, tracing the unruly and deeply political attempts to fashion a scientific account of poetry from 1880 onwards. It also investigates a set of modern poets, from Laura Riding to Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who thought about how their verse offers a form of knowledge not reducible to scientific explanation. It gives an account of the singularity of poetic thinking in their work, which actualises instances of meaning-making that prioritise the singular over the rule-governed. The Search for a Science of Verse is thus a historical inquiry into how techno-scientific reason sought to exert its full domination over the poetic imagination—and how that imagination, in turn, responded.
Although mental health is a better understood, more widely discussed topic in our society today, a degree of stigmatization persists, especially in severe cases with links to homelessness, job loss, poverty and human rights. It is also still present in environments such as the workforce, healthcare settings and educational environments, and often internalized by the sufferer themselves. This book provides a philosophical account of what mental illness stigma is, why it persists, what harms it causes to people subject to public stigma or who internalize stigma in themselves, and what can be done about it. It analyzes the process of stigmatization, both public and internalized, in the twenty-first century Western culture, especially in the United States - including the process of stereotyping, the expressive harm of stereotypes, the role of social norms in creating adaptive preferences and shaping behaviour, the moral distancing and status loss involved with social exclusion and dehumanization, and the harm of discrimination.
As the economy became more financialized, the politics of money considerably changed after the late 1970s. American and European central bankers first allied with conservative forces to fight inflation in the 1980s; then, that alliance unravelled after the 2008 financial crisis. Many observers gloss over this change because they see central bankers either as stewards of financialization, or as economists dedicated to economic stability. Nicolas Jabko shows how changing alliances between central bankers, economists, and politicians led to momentous shifts in monetary regimes. He argues that central bankers are technocrats who navigate and powerfully shape three overlapping arenas – their own internal monetary policy committees; the economics profession; and the broader public arena. Steeped in a machine-assisted analysis of central bank archives, Technocrats in Turmoil thus reveals the key role that the Fed and the ECB played in the waxing and waning of technocratic neoliberalism.
In this rich study of early modern Würzburg, Jan de Vries reconstructs the demographic life of a pre-industrial city. Utilising modern demographic techniques, he analyses data about thousands of families between 1696–1711 and examines every stage of the life course from infancy, leaving home, marriage and fertility, to widowhood, remarriage, and mortality. Close study of a single German city allows for special attention to be paid to differences of social class and migrant status, and de Vries emphasises the critical role of migrants to the make-up of the urban community. This new interpretation allows for the Sharlin theory and other questions concerning marriage choice, fertility control, and mortality risks to be tested. At every stage, de Vries compares the findings for Würzburg to those of other cities in Germany and Europe, developing existing generalisations, and contributing to a better understanding of urban historical demography.
What was the role of local history-writing in the early Islamic World, and why was it such a popular way of thinking about the past? In this innovative study, Harry Munt explores this understudied phenomenon. Examining primary sources in both Arabic and Persian, Munt argues that local history-writing must be situated within its appropriate historical contexts to explain why it was such a popular way of thinking about the past, more popular than most other contemporary forms of history-writing. The period until the end of the eleventh century CE saw many significant developments in ideas about community, about elite groups and about social authority. This study demonstrates how local history-writing played a key role in these developments, forming part of the way that Muslim scholars negotiated the dialogues between more universalist and more particularist approaches to the understanding of communities. Munt further demonstrates that local historians were participating in debates that ranged into disciplines far beyond history-writing.
Making Sense of Mass Education gives a comprehensive overview of the cultural contexts of education, addressing and debunking important myths in the field. This book is an approachable text for undergraduate and postgraduate readers studying the Sociology and Philosophy of Education. The text covers the rise of mass schooling as a disciplinary institution, including the governance of subjectivity and the regulation of childhood and youth. It examines cultural forces on the field of education and addresses the influence of philosophical thought. In the landscape of mass education, change is constant. New topics covered in the fifth edition include education policy, teachers' work, place, online spaces and artificial intelligence. Each chapter features margin definitions and boxes exploring a range of myths, encouraging teachers to think critically. Making Sense of Mass Education continues to be pertinent for pre-service and practising teachers in Australian contexts.
In 1662, in the aftermath of the Restoration, parliament passed new legislation for the settlement and removal of the poor. Important provisions were finalised in no more than a few days. But once the settlement of the poor was set in law it became an agent of historical change that affected society, state formation, and the lives of millions in Britain and beyond for centuries to come. Within a few decades, practices of local government were transformed. In towns and villages hierarchies of social status and gender were affected. The rising empire employed the settlement administration to mobilise forces for large-scale international wars and to deal with soldiers' wives and children left behind. The huge number of bureaucratic forms generated following the new policies made a lasting impact on administrative culture. The Settlement of the Poor in England is about social change and about history's unintended consequences. It is also about the struggles and experiences of individuals and communities. It reminds us how the settlement legislation still resonates today. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.