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Little has been written about Suzanne Beckett, née Déchevaux-Dumesnil (1900–1989). As Samuel Beckett's lifelong companion, she found herself in a peculiar quandary, owing to the amounts of support required by Beckett's unease with success and with the business of writing, and owing to her deep awareness of the damage that fame can cause to everyday life, friendships, and freedom. This Element offers the first full portrait of this elusive figure. It contextualises the texts she wrote under the name Suzanne Dumesnil, emphasises the significance of her artistic and literary accomplishments, and discusses her steady labour, her uncompromising discretion, and her profound reluctance to ever become a public figure as Beckett's wife.
This Element brings together the problems of economic calculation, institutional diversity, and institutional feasibility, arguing that these themes are deeply interconnected and mutually reinforcing. Building on recent developments in institutional theory, political economy, social philosophy, and logical analysis, the Element revisits the classic debates surrounding alternative economic and governance systems. The discussion is organized around three core elements: (1) an overview of recent developments in institutional theory and social philosophy, that driven by technological advances have revitalized debates on alternative economic and governance systems; (2) a reexamination of the economic calculation debate, tracing its evolution from Austrian economics to a broader theoretical synthesis incorporating institutional political economy and conflict theory; and (3) a discussion of the formal, logical, and philosophical foundations for thinking about feasibility and realizability, offering analytical tools for evaluating the plausibility of institutional alternatives within specific historical and social contexts.
Given the many environmental crises facing the planet, we need to use all tools to address them, including Shakespearean theatre. This Element explains why Shakespeare is well-positioned to be an eco-playwright, how theatre-makers can adapt his plays to matter now, and how to make more ecological the many processes of Shakespearean theatre, from set design to performing outdoors. The co-authors are both directors, and conversations between them about their recent eco-productions of The Tempest for the Royal Shakespeare Company and A Midsummer Night's Dream for Shakespeare in Yosemite (California) give clear examples of both the why and how of eco-theatrical Shakespeare.
This Element focuses on how individuals' gender values and populations' gender norms influence their attitudes toward political authoritarianism in economically advanced democracies. First, it theorizes that individuals' higher support for gender equality and freedom of sexuality (GEFS) decreases their support of political authoritarianism. This operates directly through the development of a belief system that is incompatible with political authoritarianism as a system rooted in and sustained through conformity to hegemonic masculine dominance. Additionally, this operates indirectly by strengthening support for pluralism, strengthening support for democratic socialization in households, and increasing rejection of the use of violence to control household social relations. Second, it theorizes how GEFS norms and political authoritarian norms are mutually reinforcing in shaping political culture at the country-level. The Element shows evidence consistent with these theories through analysis of data on OECD countries from 1995 to 2022 based on waves 3–7 of the World Values Surveys.
This Element reports on the creation and analysis of a 1.5-million-word corpus consisting of a year's worth of UK national press news articles about Islam and Muslims, published between December 2022 and November 2023. The corpus also contains 8,546 image files which have been automatically tagged using Google's Vertex AI. Analysis was carried out on three levels a) written text only, b) images only, c) interactions between written text and images. Using examples from the analyses, the authors demonstrate the affordances of these three approaches, providing a critical evaluation of Vertex AI's capabilities and the abilities of popular corpus software to work with visually tagged corpora. The Element acts as a practical guide for researchers who want to carry out this form of analysis. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
This Element argues that it was not just the application of medieval texts by Richard Hakluyt that made them relevant for England's budding colonial ideology; rather, it shows that these premodern texts already conveyed the essence of the expansionist mercantilism and colonialist imperialism that would characterise early English exceptionalism and the Elizabethan reach for the Americas. The upshot of the author's argument is threefold. First, Hakluyt and his contemporaries were much better and closer readers of medieval travel texts than we give them credit for; second, the ideology behind English colonialism was shaped in the late medieval period, not in Elizabethan England; and third, another facet of periodisation, with its epistemological emphasis on rupture rather than continuity, comes under pressure.
The development of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) has led to intense wonder, surprise, excitement, and concern within the language teaching profession. These tools offer the potential to assist language teachers in helping their learners achieve their language learning goals, and at the same time, risk disrupting language teaching and learning processes, the teaching profession, and possibly the instrumental needs to learn foreign languages. This Element provides an accessible introduction and guide to the use of GenAI for language teaching. It aims to facilitate language teachers' development of the professional knowledge and skills they need to use GenAI responsibly, ethically and effectively. The Element It is a valuable resource for pre-service and in-service language teachers of all experience levels. Each section includes helpful tips and questions for reflection to get teachers started with GenAI while ensuring they engage critically and responsibly with these tools. Evidence-informed approaches are promoted throughout the Element.
Using audit to identify where improvement is needed and providing feedback to healthcare professionals to encourage behaviour change is an important healthcare improvement strategy. In this Element, the authors review the evidence base for using audit and feedback to support improvement, summarising its historical origins, the theories that guide it, and the evidence that supports it. Finally, the authors review limitations and risks with the approach, and outline opportunities for future research. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Is the world facing creeping fascism? And if so, how is it configured in contemporary circumstances? A wide-ranging debate has developed in recent years among scholars increasingly worried by the weakness of liberal democracy, and the growing electoral power of national populist movements in Europe. In this account, the rise of the current wave of populism was preceded, and is now accompanied by an important theoretical elaboration, initiated in the 1970's in France by the intellectuals of the Nouvelle Droite and continued by Russian, American and Latin-American intellectuals and political strategists. The theoretical goals of this meta-political elaboration is a reformulation of the values of cultural diversity, identity politics, and post-colonialism, a process which in this Element the author defines as the attempt to decolonize the 'postcolonial Western mind'.
Esoteric Orientalism studies Victorian esotericism and academic Orientalism as the nineteenth century's most significant comparative frameworks for understanding global religions, languages, and cultures. Occultist formations like the Theosophical Society (led by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky) and Orientalist disciplines like philology and comparative religion (as exemplified by Friedrich Max Müller) both believed in the essential kinship of East and West, routed through the Aryan family hypothesis—generating new visions of race and caste even while expanding the category of self. Still, theosophy and philology shared a contentious relationship. Blavatsky's writings anticipate postcolonial commentary in critiquing Orientalist scholarly presumption; her fantastical citational practices hold a mortifying mirror to academic Orientalism. Ultimately, this study traces how heterogeneous, riven, and powerfully consequential the larger discourse of Orientalism could be. Esoteric Orientalism combines broad historical narrative with literary close reading, recasting Theosophy as a speculative and imaginative construct through which to read Orientalist discourse more broadly.
This Element draws on the transdisciplinary field of agroecology to clarify and deepen Catholic social teaching's natural law ethic. In response to the ecological crisis, social teaching has begun to appeal to ecology and the exemplarity of natural ecosystems to foster care of creation. Some have criticized this natural law ethic, along with its invocations of balance and harmony, as overly idealized, advocating instead for an alternative view in which ecological dynamism and ambiguity preclude appeals to ecology for guidance. While sympathizing with these criticisms, this Element offers a different way forward, contending that social teaching's natural law ethic should be revised rather than abandoned. Agroecology displays an approach to tilling and keeping the earth that accommodates dynamism and ambiguity, while also discerning ecological principles and processes that are mimicked agriculturally. In short, this Element argues that engaging agroecology can help social teaching clarify, concretize, and deepen its understanding of natural law.
What counts as knowledge, expertise, and theory? How are knowledge hierarchies connected to emotional and hierarchies of subjects? How does the division between emotion and reason shape our experiences? The Element addresses these questions by exploring the Greek feminist birth control movement (1974–1986), focusing on the production and circulation of knowledge, termed as affective epistemologies of antimilima (talking back). This concept reinterprets women's lived and embodied knowledge, emerging at the intersection of academia and social movements, as a form of resistance against established expertise. By drawing on feminist theorists like Donna Haraway and Sara Ahmed, the Element critically examines the relationship between scientific and experiential knowledge. This analysis reconfigures the interplay between rationality and emotion, providing a critique to the binary model of thought and suggesting new avenues for democratic knowledge, society, and citizenship. Historical tracing of these theories offers a counter-narrative to contemporary anti-gender, anti-intellectual, and far-right politics.
Although the first thing one learns about the 'Byzantine Empire' is that it was really the eastern Roman empire, scholars have preferred to call it 'Byzantine' in a repudiation of the self-conception and emic vocabulary of the inhabitants of that polity. The terminology of 'Byzantium' artificially severs the 'medieval' eastern Roman empire from its 'classical' roots allowing for the fundamentally Eurocentric schematization of history into 'ancient,' 'medieval,' and 'Renaissance' periods. 'Byzantine' is not a benign term of art but has served a variety of political and historiographical agendas including maintaining nationalist visions of ethnic continuity, creating precedents for communism, enabling politics of nostalgia for Orthodox dominion, and constructing visions of western European superiority and masculinity that justify colonialism. By exploring these intellectual legacies of 'Byzantium,' and the benefits of conceptualizing Roman history as an unsevered whole, this Element exhorts scholars to let go of the 'Byzantine' misnomer.
This Element offers a portrait of leadership exemplars in UK finance. It challenges the common trope that finance is morally bankrupt. More significantly, it provides an empirically informed account of what it means to lead ethically and by example. Drawing upon Linda Zagzebski's philosophy of moral exemplarism, as well as Braun and Clarke's reflexive approach to thematic analysis, this Element sifts through a rich interview dataset to identify three types of exemplary leader. The sage exemplifies a purpose-giving wisdom. The hero is admired for a courageous form of empathy. And the novice, an under-appreciated type of exemplar, is singled out for curiosity. Foregrounding the place of positive emotions in role modeling, this Element sheds light on the virtues and psychology of leading by example. It also serves as an exemplar of what the humanities can contribute to the dynamic field of leadership studies.
Climate impacts and risk, within and across cities, are distributed highly unequally. Cities located in low latitudes are more vulnerable to climate risk and impacts than in high latitudes, due to the large proportion of informal settlements relative to the housing stock and more frequent extremes. According to EM-DAT, about 60% of environmental disasters in cities relate to riverine floods. Riverine floods and heatwaves cause about 33% of deaths in cities. However, cold-waves and droughts impact most people in cities (42% and 39% of all people, respectively). Human vulnerability intersects with hazardous, underserved communities. Frequently affected groups include women, single parents, and low-income elderly. Responses to climatic events are conditioned by the informality of social fabric and institutions, and by inequitable distribution of impacts, decision-making, and outcomes. To ensure climate-resilient development, adaptation and mitigation actions must include the broader urban context of informality and equity and justice principles. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
The relationship between religion and morality has been a steadfast topic of inquiry since the dawn of the social sciences. This Element probes how the social sciences have addressed this relationship by detailing how theory and method have evolved over the past few generations. Sections 1 and 2 examine the historical roots of cross-cultural inquiry and Section 3 addresses the empirical tools developed to address cross-cultural patterns statistically. Sections 4-6 address how the contemporary evolutionary social sciences have been addressing the role religious cognition, behaviour, and beliefs play on moral conduct. By critically examining the tools and theories specifically developed to answer questions about the evolution of morality, society, and the gods, this Element shows that much of our current knowledge about this relationship has been significantly shaped by our cultural history as a field. It argues that the relationship between religion and morality is, despite considerable diversity in form, quite common around the world.
Linguistic synesthesias combine different senses, as in English smooth melody (touch→sound). For nearly a century, researchers have gathered data that has been interpreted as supporting the notion of a hierarchical ordering of the senses. According to this proposal, expressions map the presumed-to-be 'lower' senses of touch, taste, and smell onto the presumed-to-be 'higher' senses of sound and sight. Here, this proposal is tested in the first-ever meta-analysis of linguistic synesthesias, combining thirty-eight datasets from fourteen different languages. The authors demonstrate that clear patterns emerge from the data, but many such patterns are inconsistent with the notion of a linear hierarchical order or a simple lower/higher divide of the senses. This calls for a shift in what theories are considered to be viable for explaining asymmetries between the senses in linguistic synesthesia.
Today, policing in the United States is facing a crisis of legitimacy and calls for reform. This Element examines this crisis and describes the adverse effects of problematic police behavior on community members, police officers, and public safety. A critical analysis of past reform efforts is offered, including why they have had limited success in changing police operations, police culture, or styles of policing. The central thesis of this Element is that most police reforms have failed because we continue to use the wrong metrics to evaluate police performance. Cities have yet to systematically measure what matters to the public, namely how people are treated by the police. Hence, this Element proposes a new system of accountability using data from body-worn cameras and contact surveys to measure and incentivize procedural justice. Translating evidence into real organizational change should improve street-level policing, enhance police legitimacy, and improve public safety.
Organisms are central for biology. However, conceptualizing the unit of the organism is not easy. This Element discusses challenges to base biological reasoning and practice on the concept of organism. After many decades dominated by the paradigm of the gene, the organism is making a comeback in the bio- and biomedical sciences. It is again recognized as a causally efficacious, autonomous, and active unit that transcends the properties of genes and affects its own development and evolution – especially in fields like epigenetics, niche construction theory, and evolutionary developmental biology. This Element investigates these developments from a perspective of integrated history and philosophy of science. It focuses on conceptual, biotheoretical, and historical dimensions, as well as sociopolitical and anthropological aspects of today's 'return of the organism.' In particular, it discusses solutions for challenges of organism-centered biosciences in the 21st century. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
What explains change and continuity in Japan's economic statecraft? This Element examines the interplay between factional dynamics in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and Japan's foreign policy through two cases: Japan's unprecedented decision to impose severe sanctions on Russia following its 2022 Ukraine invasion, and its decades-long ASEAN strategy amid political uncertainty and great power competition. The authors find that factional balance or the outsized influence of a large faction facilitates abrupt political-economic shifts, sustained until a similar dynamic triggers correction. Unlike most systems, Japan's intra-party politics do not lead to full leadership turnover, enabling factions to influence policy while empowering non-leadership members to drive change. This dual role strengthens barriers to change, embedding political inertia. Using factional membership data from 1961 to 2024, they argue that factions are a more systematic unit of analysis than political entrepreneurs in understanding the relationship between Japan's domestic politics and foreign policy decisions.