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110 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 1 of 6

Knowledge and Narrative

Knowledge and Narrative
  • Chiel van den Akker
  • Published online:
    18 November 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • This Element is concerned with narrative as a mode of knowing. It draws attention to the epistemic value of historical narrative qua narrative. This it does not only in an abstract sense, but also with the help of recent works of history. Special attention is given to narrative sentences and narrative theses. A narrative thesis redescribes the actions and events the historian is concerned with and allows for the temporal whole or unity we associate with narrative, with its beginning, middle, and end. A thesis, it is argued, is indispensable and qualifies the work of historians as narrative. The concern with narrative has not lost any of its relevance, for the simple reason that it informs us about history as an academic discipline and the knowledge it produces. For as long as historians decide what events are important in their past and for what reason, they will rely on narrative.
Religion and Food

Religion and Food
  • Alexandra S. Wormley, Adam B. Cohen
  • Published online:
    18 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • Religion plays an important role in what and how we eat. Indeed, food is a critical component of religion-as well as a reflection of the other components that make religion unique. This fact is what necessitates greater attention towards food as a lens for understanding psychological phenomenon both within the psychology of religion and the social scientific community at large. Utilizing theories and exemplars from multiple disciplines, the authors discuss how food relates to four dimensions of religion – beliefs (Section 2), values (Section 3), practices (Section 4), and community (Section 5). Throughout the Element and in a concluding section, the authors provide exciting directions for future research. In addition to providing a review of our current understanding of the role of food and religion, this work ultimately seeks to inspire researchers and students to investigate the role of food in religious life.
Revisiting Justice

Revisiting Justice
  • The Moral Meaning of Parole
  • Netanel Dagan
  • Published online:
    17 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
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  • Expanding the boundaries of the 'moral turn' in criminology to the realm of punishment administration, this Element proposes reconceptualizing parole through a moral lens. Drawing from a mixed-method study of parole hearings for homicide cases in Israel, the author argues that during parole hearings, parole actors (Attorney General representatives, secondary victims, parole applicants, and parole board members) conduct complex forms of moral labor, specifically retributive-oriented. This moral labor goes beyond rehabilitation and risk assessment to 'do late justice.' In doing such moral labor, parole actors negotiate the moral meaning of crime, character, and deserved punishment with the passage of time. In conclusion, as demonstrated by the current study, Criminologists should engage to a greater extent with the moral meaning of punishment administration, and retributive theorists should aim to better understand the lived experiences of punishment.
Minority Religions, the Law, and the Courts

Minority Religions, the Law, and the Courts
  • Cases and Consequences
  • James T. Richardson
  • Published online:
    17 November 2025
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    11 December 2025
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  • This Element examines the complex intersections between minority religions, legal protections and restrictions, and the role of courts in securing, or inhibiting, religious freedom. It considers the legal status of minority religions in selected countries from a comparative perspective, using sociology of law theories to explain how legal systems treat such religious groups. Relevant actions of the European Court of Human Rights are examined as is how minority religions are dealt with in selected societies where authoritarian or theocratic systems of governance prevail. The Element then examines how interactions with law and the courts have led to changes, or 'deformations,' in selected well-known and controversial new and other minority religions. The Element concludes by observing how courts in Europe and North America have used cases involving minority faiths to promote their own agendas and authority, as well as accomplish other important considerations, including religious freedom.
Law’s Language

Law’s Language
  • Meaning and Normativity
  • Daniel Wodak
  • Published online:
    17 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • The language of law includes normative or prescriptive terms such as 'obligation' and 'permission'. How do we explain the meaning of prescriptive legal language? This has long been regarded as a problem for positivists, since at first glance their view suggests we can derive an ought – a legal obligation or right or permission – from descriptive social facts alone. This Element outlines what we should want from a semantics of prescriptive legal language, critically evaluates four leading semantic accounts, and argues that legal prescriptivity is not, in the end, a problem for positivists.
Performing Urban Ecologies

Performing Urban Ecologies
  • Lisa Woynarski
  • Published online:
    17 November 2025
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    11 December 2025
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  • With the majority of the global population living in cities, urbanisation and climate crisis have become urgent planetary issues. This Element examines 'urban eco-performance', exploring how theatre and performance intersect with urbanisation and ecological crises to reimagine equitable urban futures. Through rigorous ecodramaturgical analyses, this Element critiques the colonial and capitalist systems shaping cities and highlights performance's role in addressing climate justice. Performances from Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, Taiwan, UK and USA, as well as Indigenous performances, are brought together for the first time to examine how they challenge the human/nature divide, revealing cities as vibrant ecological spaces. These performances foreground underrepresented voices and reframe cities as 'bio-urban' spaces. This Element integrates decolonial and intersectional ecological frameworks over three thematic sections: Living Cities, Petro-Cities and Urban Futures Against the Apocalypse. It argues for justice for marginalised communities while envisioning cities as interconnected ecosystems that can foster collective action and ecological resilience.
Lauren Gunderson and Feminist Theatre in the Twenty-First Century

Lauren Gunderson and Feminist Theatre in the Twenty-First Century
  • Noelia Hernando-Real
  • Published online:
    17 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • This Element is the first scholarly study of the theatre of Lauren Gunderson (b. 1982), one of the most produced US playwrights and a self-declared feminist playwright. Her feminist claims and theatrical interventions are assessed through four key strands of her theatre making: parodies of Shakespeare's canon; women-centred revisions to history; women and illness; and 'entertaining' feminism through popular theatre forms. Moving between the mainstream and the experimental, her theatre ranges from realism and quasi well-made plays to the experimental in a postmodern/Brechtian fashion, inviting consideration of the form(s) deployed for staging feminism in the twenty-first century. The Element discusses how Gunderson adapts the legacies of second-wave feminist theatre in the US to provide accessible experimental theatre and how she adopts popular genres in the interest of popular feminisms, giving way to an 'in-between' feminist practice: a feminist-theatre pathway that lies somewhere 'in between' the second-wave past and new directions.
Monotheism and Creation

Monotheism and Creation
  • David Cheetham
  • Published online:
    17 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
  • This Element discusses the idea of creation ex nihilo as an expression of monotheistic belief mainly with reference to Jewish and Christian traditions. It outlines the philosophical and theological discussion about monotheism and creation, considering key historical figures such as Philo, Irenaeus, Augustine, and Aquinas as well as contemporary thinkers. It reviews key topics such as divine sovereignty, the goodness of creation, pantheism, process, and feminist thinking on creation. It argues for creation ex nihilo over other models. In particular, it examines the notion of 'creaturehood' as an overlooked and under-developed dimension in contemporary debates about the relationship between created humanity and the one God. The doctrine of creation does not just address the question of origins, it also serves to affirm the finite or immanent aspects of life.
Early Twentieth Century New Black Religious Movements in the United States

Early Twentieth Century New Black Religious Movements in the United States
  • Darrius D. Hills
  • Published online:
    17 November 2025
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    11 December 2025
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  • African American religions include faith orientations that incorporate and deviate from Afro-Protestantism. Yet, contemporary scholarship in religious studies is always bolstered by any supplementary work that examines the plethora of 'extrachurch' orientations that Black communities adopt in their varied pursuits of truth, transcendence, and ultimacy. In this vein, it is necessary to recognize the emergence of powerful alternative religious movements that provided spiritual and theological sustenance for the expression of Black faith. This Element offers an historical overview of four of these traditions: Conjure and Spiritualism, the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, and African American varieties of New Thought. It explores the social and cultural factors in American society and American race relations that bolstered their emergence and considers the impact such movements had and continue to have on ideas about Black selfhood, Black religious authority, and the sacrality of Black bodies.
China for Africa's Industrialization?

China for Africa's Industrialization?
  • Carlos Oya
  • Published online:
    15 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
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  • China's engagement in Africa since 2000 consists of a diverse set of institutions, activities, relations, investment flows and other economic statecraft events. These have generated opportunities for economic transformation, reviving the prospects for industrialization and job creation in some African countries following decades of neglect. While the case for industrialization-led structural transformation is strong, the proposed means of pursuing this pathway vary, necessitating bold vision and interventions. Whether through infrastructure funding and building, or direct greenfield investments, China is helping lay the foundations for industrialization in Africa, albeit unevenly and slowly. The vectors and outcomes are, however, variegated, calling for a comparative examination. Therefore, the Element illustrates variations in outcomes and the importance of context when considering the vectors of Africa–China engagements, how they contribute to industrialization prospects, and the central role of policy agency, bargaining and contestation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Science Denial

Science Denial
  • Post-Truth or Post-Trust?
  • Gabriele Contessa
  • Published online:
    14 November 2025
    Print publication:
    20 November 2025
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  • Over the last couple of decades, there has been increasing concern about the alleged rise of various forms of science denial. But what exactly is science denial? Is it really on the rise? If so, what explains its rise? And what is so concerning about it? This Element argues that the notion of science denial is highly ambiguous and that, once we carefully distinguish among all the different phenomena that are often conflated under this label, it is doubtful that any of them warrants all of the concerns that animate the critics of science denial. This has important consequences for how we understand the complex and delicate relationship between science and the public and, more generally, the collective epistemic malaise afflicting liberal democracies.
Abuse in New Religious Movements

Abuse in New Religious Movements
  • Sarah Harvey
  • Published online:
    14 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
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  • This Element analyses issues of abuse in new religious movements (NRMs). It argues that abuse in NRMs is not unique but that certain factors can be intensified in NRM contexts – propensities for separation from wider society, teachings on unique legitimacy and exclusivity, and charismatic authority. First, a historical overview addresses how abuse in NRMs has been approached and understood, linking this to the development of NRM and cultic studies and their preferred terminology. Second, a theoretical framework allows consideration of the ways in which the interlinked structural and cultural factors of religious movements can contribute to the perpetration, legitimisation or concealment of abuse. Finally, the Element presents an applied case study analysing the interplay of these factors in the Jesus Fellowship Church, a UK-based NRM which closed in 2019, partly in recognition of abuses that had occurred. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Leo XIII and the Rise of Neo-Thomism

Leo XIII and the Rise of Neo-Thomism
  • Valfredo Maria Rossi
  • Published online:
    13 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
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  • This Element examines the historical context and intellectual implications of the Thomistic revival inaugurated by Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris, pursuing two principal objectives. First, this Element demonstrates that Aeterni Patris represented a decisive turning point in Catholic philosophical and theological thought: it not only revitalised Thomism but also brought an end to the doctrinal pluralism that had characterized nineteenth-century Catholicism. Second, the study argues that the Thomistic revival envisioned by Leo XIII was not a neutral academic enterprise concerned merely with a renewed engagement with Aquinas's doctrine, but rather an ideological initiative rooted in the framework of intransigent Catholicism, wherein the restoration of Thomism was conceived as instrumental to the formation of a new Christian worldview.
Discourse and Queer Sinophone Male Identities

Discourse and Queer Sinophone Male Identities
  • A Western Immigrant Perspective
  • Phil Freestone
  • Published online:
    12 November 2025
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    11 December 2025
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  • This Element analyses the sociolinguistic navigation of cultural and ideological influence among queer male-identified individuals in Chengdu and Taipei. By analysing how queer and ethnically Chinese-identified individuals navigate ideological influences, it investigates some of the complexities of culture and identity and their dependence on semiotics and situated communication. Thus, the social affordances and constraints relevant to specific individuals in these contexts are described not only in terms of influences like 'Chinese culture' or 'Western ideology', but also in terms of the ongoing communicative processes through which they orient themselves to diverse structural influences. As such, this Element engages with the diversity typically subsumed into common identity categories. In turn, through its qualified deconstructionist approach to identity, it sheds novel light on the ideological complexity that tends to underlie queer individuals' performance of 'who they are', in Sinophone contexts and elsewhere.
Performing Visible Pregnancy in Shakespeare's Plays

Performing Visible Pregnancy in Shakespeare's Plays
  • Patricia Lennox
  • Published online:
    11 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
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  • This Element considers pregnant women and their costumes in the staging of Shakespeare's plays. It examines the connections between a character's costume and the changing social conventions of pregnancy. It questions mid twentieth century productions' reduction and elimination of well-established visible pregnancy costumes. It considers the role played by the sexual revolution in the sixties in visible pregnancy's reinstatement. The Element focusses on the varied significance of its presence to actors and directors and explores the archives to chart this previously under-examined interaction between social conventions, costumes, and the actors who wear them.
Beckett and Leopardi

Beckett and Leopardi
  • Peter Boxall, Peter Nicholls
  • Published online:
    11 November 2025
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    11 December 2025
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  • This Element revisits the relation between Giacomo Leopardi and Samuel Beckett to argue that the dialogue between them might offer new ways of thinking about the nature of both writers' pessimism. The authors suggest that Leopardi becomes increasingly important for Beckett, not only because he frames a literary philosophy of scepticism, but because he gives a rich account of the means by which thoroughgoing pessimism might open on to an unenchanted mode of persistence. In doing so, the Element looks past the impasse – between going on and not going on – that threatens to forestall imaginative possibilities for both writers.
Wrongful Discrimination

Wrongful Discrimination
  • Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen
  • Published online:
    11 November 2025
    Print publication:
    31 December 2025
  • In a generic sense, to discriminate is to differentiate. Generic discrimination is not wrongful. But many instances of a more specific form of discrimination – differentiating between people because they are members of different socially salient groups (henceforth: group discrimination) – are wrongful. This means that people subjected to group discrimination are often wronged, and this bears importantly on whether such acts are morally impermissible. The three main accounts of what makes group discrimination wrongful appeal to considerations of harm, disrespect, and social relations of inequality, respectively. While each of them can explain the wrongfulness of some paradigmatic instances of wrongful direct discrimination, they explain the wrongfulness of a set of three important non-paradigmatic forms of discrimination – indirect discrimination, implicit bias, and algorithmic discrimination – less well. Overall, the prospects of a monistic account of the wrongfulness of discrimination are bleak.
Race, Genetics, History

Race, Genetics, History
  • New Practices, New Approaches
  • Alexandra P. Alberda, Njabulo Chipangura, Lara Choksey, Jerome de Groot, Maya Sharma
  • Published online:
    11 November 2025
    Print publication:
    11 December 2025
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  • This Element, about historical practice and genetics, seeks to understand what is at stake in presenting, preserving, and articulating the past in the present. Historical practice is both conceptual and material, a consonance of approach which is reflected in the innovative and non-traditional format of the Element itself – not simply in its length, but its constitution. The Element was created collaboratively with contributions from a range of disciplines, backgrounds, and areas of professional expertise. It consists of a series of interventions which are then discussed by the contributors and is foundationally multi-voiced and discursive. The Element attempts to be non-extractive, ethical, inclusive, collaborative, and constantly ongoing and provisional in its representation. The Element strives to contribute to ongoing attempts to rethink, reconfigure, reassess, and entirely change the object of study and the practice of history.
Aesthetic Knowledge

Aesthetic Knowledge
  • Jon Robson
  • Published online:
    11 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
  • How do we arrive at aesthetic knowledge? This might seem an odd question for philosophers to ask. Some will take its answer to be obvious: we learn about the aesthetic qualities of paintings by looking at them, of musical works by listening to them, and so on. Others will take the question to be misguided, how can there be aesthetic knowledge when aesthetics is merely 'a matter of taste'? Finally, aesthetic knowledge itself might seem singularly unimportant. We don't engage with beautiful artworks to learn that they're beautiful but, rather, to appreciate that beauty. This Element argues that each of these objections is misplaced. Aesthetic knowledge is both valuable and attainable, but canonical philosophical (and folk) views of how we attain it are mistaken. The Element surveys some recent arguments against the reliability of aesthetic perception and in favour of other, more social, sources of aesthetic knowledge.
Stress in Childhood

Stress in Childhood
  • Camelia E. Hostinar, Anna M. Parenteau, Geneva M. Jost, Sally Hang, Joanna Y. Guan, Jamie M. Lawler
  • Published online:
    06 November 2025
    Print publication:
    04 December 2025
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  • The innocence of childhood does not protect against exposure to stress. More than half of US children are exposed to adverse experiences, such as abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic violence, parental psychopathology, or divorce, and all children encounter normative stressors like school transitions and challenges with peers. This Element discusses research on stress psychobiology during childhood, from birth to age ten. The Element focuses on important contexts that shape children's responses to stress and their coping capacities, including the family system, peers, schools, neighborhoods, the broader culture, as well as clinical settings. Sources of stress and resilience in each context are described.

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