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This Element focuses on the frequent staging of the most precarious fraction of the working class in the context of a theatre industry, academy and audiences that are dominated by the cultural fraction of the middle class. It interrogates the staging of an abjectified figure as a means of challenging the stigmatisation of the poor in political discourse, defined here as an ideological imaginary of moral and cultural deficit. The Element argues that in seeking to subvert such an imaginary, theatre that stages the abjectified subject may risk consolidating two further imaginaries of working class deficit that have been confected in political discourse from the 1990s to the 2020s. In conclusion, the Element reflects on the political potential of theatre that rather seeks to eradicate class descriptors, conflicts and hierarchies altogether. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
There is now a Happiness Revolution to go along with the earlier Industrial and Demographic Revolutions. The Happiness Revolution is captured using people's happiness scores, as reported in public surveys, whereas the earlier revolutions are reflected by economic production (such as GDP) and life expectancy. Increases in happiness are chiefly due to social-science welfare policies that alleviate people's foremost concerns – those centering on family life, health, and jobs. This Element traces the course of the Happiness Revolution throughout Europe since the 1980s when comprehensive and comparable data on people's happiness first become available. Which countries lead and which lag? How is happiness distributed – are the rich happier than the poor, men than women, old than young, native than foreign born, city than countryfolk? How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted happiness? These are among the questions addressed in this Element. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
While the life and career of Ellen Terry (1847–1928) have attracted decades of attention from theatre historians and feminist biographers, one chapter remains hidden: Terry's tour of her solo Shakespeare lectures to Australia and New Zealand in 1914. This bold venture, made at the age of sixty-six, has been interpreted as an indication of Terry's declining physical andmental health following her 1906 Jubilee. Yet Terry claimed that 'while in Australia, although a woman, I am permitted to be a person', testifying affinity with the geopolitical region in which women had already achieved the right to vote in federal elections and to run for parliament. This Element undertakes the first comprehensive examination of the 1914 tour to reveal Terry's professional agency, her creative autonomy, her skilful navigation of ageist sexism, her eager receptivity to new natural environments, and her friendship with international opera star, Nellie Melba.
Mass polarization is one of the defining features of politics in the twenty-first century, but efforts to understand its causes and effects are often hindered by empirical challenges related to measurement and data availability. To address these challenges and provide a common standard of analysis for researchers, this Element presents the Polarization in Comparative Attitudes Project (PolarCAP). PolarCAP clearly defines polarization as a property of group relations and uses a Bayesian measurement model to estimate smooth panels of ideological and affective polarization across ninety-two countries and forty-nine years. The author uses these data to provide a descriptive account of mass polarization across time and space. They further show how PolarCAP facilitates substantive inference by applying it to three sets of variables often hypothesized as causes or consequences of polarization: institutional design, economic crisis, and democracy. Open-source software makes PolarCAP easily accessible to scholars and practitioners.
How do individuals make up their mind about politics? This question has sparked a vigorous debate in the study of political behavior for the last few decades. Some scholars contend that citizens can and should engage in political reflection, while others highlight biases in human political reasoning that make reflection impossible. This Element is about the conditions under which citizens can be motivated to transcend their egocentric biases and engage in reflection. Rather than asking whether citizens are capable of reflection, it shifts focus to a more productive question: how to motivate reflection. Firstly, it argues that (situational) empathy for the other side can inspire citizens to think reflectively about politics. Secondly, the Element proposes that deliberative institutions have the potential to evoke empathy for the other side in individuals. Thirdly, it draws on experimental and qualitative data from Belgium, Chile, Ireland, and the UK to test the theoretical expectations.
Heidegger calls the thought that 'being is presence' the 'thunderbolt' that led him to link being and time and inspired his deconstruction of Western metaphysics. However, the scope of the concept of presence varies in his texts; the narrower it is, the more dramatic yet less plausible is his 'thunderbolt.' What is presence? Does Heidegger ultimately reject presence as the meaning of being, or does he accept it if conceived broadly enough? This study surveys the meaning and status of 'presence' in Heidegger. The author argues that he maintains a critical perspective, and that his critique can be applied not only to the tradition as interpreted in his 'history of being,' but also to contemporary phenomena such as information technology.
Despite enormous efforts at healthcare improvement, major challenges remain in achieving optimal outcomes, safety, cost, and value. This Element introduces the concept of learning health systems, which have been proposed as a possible solution. Though many different variants of the concept exist, they share a learning cycle of capturing data from practice, turning it into knowledge, and putting knowledge back into practice. How learning systems are implemented is highly variable. This Element emphasises that they are sociotechnical systems and offers a structured framework to consider their design and operation. It offers a critique of the learning health system approach, recognising that more has been said about the aspiration than perhaps has been delivered. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
This Element advances a theory of social cues to explain how international institutions legitimize foreign policy. It reframes legitimization as a type of identity politics. Institutions confer legitimacy by sending social cues that exert pressures to conform and alleviate social–relational concerns regarding norm abidance, group participation, and status and image. Applied to the domain of humanitarian wars, the argument implies that liberal democracies vis-à-vis NATO can influence citizens and policymakers within their community, the primary participants of these military operations. Case studies, news media, a survey of policymakers, and survey experiments conducted in multiple countries validate the social cue theory while refuting alternative arguments relating to legality, material burden sharing, Western regionalism, and rational information transmission. The Element provides an understanding of institutional legitimacy that challenges existing perspectives and contributes to debates about multilateralism, humanitarian intervention, and identity. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The field of criminology is limited by a 'hidden' measurement crisis. It is hidden because scholars either are not aware of the shortcomings of their measures or have implicitly agreed that scales with certain properties merit publication. It is a crisis because the approaches used to construct measures do not employ modern systematic psychometric methods. As a result, the degree to which existing measures have methodological limitations is unknown. The purpose of this Element is to unmask this hidden crisis and provide a case study demonstrating how to build a measure of a prominent criminological construct through modern systematic psychometric methods. Using multiple surveys and item response theory, it develops a ten-item scale of procedural justice in policing. This can be used in primary research and to adjudicate existing measures. The goal is to reveal the nature of the field's measurement crisis and show a strategy for solving it.
Building on a general trend in academia towards convergence in teaching and research, in which interdisciplinarity and relevance are cornerstones, Transdisciplinary Shakespeare Pedagogy offers a sense both of the opportunities and challenges in teaching Shakespeare beyond the confines of the English literature department by setting up structural partnerships across disciplinary units and provides possible ways forward on the road to wider cooperation, collaboration and integration between curriculums, teachers and students of different disciplines. With Shakespeare studies increasingly under fire, the author analyses, through four recent case studies of university courses for a variety of students, the potential for integration of Shakespeare studies, social sciences and societal challenges.
This Element explores the life, teaching, and legacy of philosopher and spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. From an obscure childhood in south India, he was 'discovered' at age fourteen by the Theosophical Society as the vehicle for the prophesied World Teacher of this cosmic age. At age 34, he disaffiliated from the Society, became an independent teacher, and, for sixty years, traveled widely and addressed thousands of audiences on the need to develop awareness and attention for transformation of consciousness. His teaching defines the human condition as perilous, dominated almost completely by cultural and personal conditioning, fear, and negative emotions. Freedom from these perils, his teaching states, occurs through rigorous self-observation and inquiry in the search for truth. While extremely popular, Krishnamurti rejected the mantle of authority invariably attributed to spiritual masters and teachers. He created schools in his name to implement his pedagogy of non-authoritarianism and freedom from conditioning.
The search for a new scientific theory is typically prompted by an encounter with something in the world that cannot be explained by current theories. This is not the case for the search for a theory of quantum gravity, which has been primarily motivated by theoretical and philosophical concerns. This Element introduces some of the motivations for seeking a theory of quantum gravity, with the aim of instigating a more critical perspective on how they are used in defining and constraining the theory sought. These motivations include unification, incompatibilities between general relativity and quantum field theory, consistency, singularity resolution, and results from black hole thermodynamics.
Metrical systems differ in patterns of stress assignment, the domains over which those patterns are built, and acoustic manifestations of stress. It has been widely debated in the phonological/phonetic literature how stress should be represented, what mechanisms govern its assignment, and whether the phonetic underpinnings of primary/secondary stress exist independently of other prominence effects (e.g. boundary strengthening, pitch accents). This Element addresses these fundamental issues on the basis of an in-depth study of a hybrid (lexical-grammatical) metrical system of Ukrainian. It synthesizes previous results with new findings, focusing on the phonetic as well as formal description of the Ukrainian system. The lexical-grammatical stress interactions in Ukrainian pose a challenge for current metrical theories, shed light on the relation between the lexical and grammatical stress domains, and the relationship between categorical and gradient aspects of the metrical system. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
While there has been a great deal (comparatively) written about Rus as part of medieval Europe in the last twenty years, the popular perception of it remains a part of the so-called 'Byzantine Commonwealth.' This traditional framing discounts Rusian ties to the west and exaggerates those to 'Byzantium,' elevating the rhetoric used by Russian nationalists to separate Russia from Europe. This Element provides an accurate historical account of medieval Rus that corrects the modern misuse of medieval history: a resource for academics interested in the results of current research on the place of the Kingdom of Rus in the medieval world. It brings together and synthesizes existing scholarship on Rus to present a complete picture of the kingdom of Rus, and its orientation within the wider medieval world, with a particular focus on the eleventh and twelfth centuries.
A study of Wittgenstein on the logic of colour concepts. His remarks on the subject in the Tractatus are considered first, then the remarks he drafted when he returned to philosophy after a decade away fromit, then his treatment of colour concepts during the next two decades followed by the remarks in Remarks on Colour. The emphasis is on the problems he examines and the solutions he proposes. His discussion of colour incompatibility is defended, his examination of colour concepts in the 1930s and 1940s detailed and explained, and the remarks he composed at the end of his life considered with an eye to why they were written and what they add to remarks previously composed. It is argued that his aims are different from those normally attributed to him and, while he achieves a great deal, he does not resolve all the problems he tackles.
How exactly is technology transforming us and our worlds, and what (if anything) can and should we do about it? Heidegger already felt this philosophical question concerning technology pressing in on him in 1951, and his thought-full and deliberately provocative response is still worth pondering today. What light does his thinking cast not just on the nuclear technology of the atomic age but also on more contemporary technologies such as genome engineering, synthetic biology, and the latest advances in information technology, so-called “generative AIs” like ChatGPT? These are some of the questions this book addresses, situating the latest controversial technologies in the light of Heidegger's influential understanding of technology as an historical mode of ontological disclosure. In this way, we seek to take the measure of Heidegger's ontological understanding of technology as a constellation of intelligibility with an important philosophical heritage and a dangerous but still promising future.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic engagement with the social world of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, this Element explores the mainstreaming of sustainable development principles in the heritage field. It illustrates how, while deeply entwined in the UN standardizing framework, sustainability narratives are expanding the frontiers of heritage and unsettling conventional understandings of its social and political functions. Ethnographic description of UNESCO administrative practices and case studies explain how the sustainabilization of intangible cultural heritage entails a fundamental shift in perspective: heritage is no longer nostalgically regarded as a fragile relic in need of preservation but as a resource for the future with new purposes and the potential to address broader concerns and anxieties of our times, ranging from water shortages to mental health. This might ultimately mean that the safeguarding endeavor is no longer about us protecting heritage but about heritage protecting us.
Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics is one of the most important and influential works in the history of moral philosophy. The Methods of Ethics clarifies and tackles some of the most enduring and difficult problems of morality. It offers readers a high-calibre example of analytical moral philosophy. This Element interprets and critically evaluates select positions and arguments in Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics. It focuses specifically on Sidgwick's moral epistemology, his argument against common-sense morality, his argument for utilitarianism, his argument for rational egoism, and his argument for what he calls 'the dualism of practical reason', the thesis that utilitarianism and rational egoism are coordinate but conflicting requirements of rationality. Sidgwick's Ethics attempts to acquaint readers with the scholarly and theoretical debates relating to Sidgwick's theses, while providing readers with a greater appreciation of the depth and sophistication of Sidgwick's masterpiece.
This Element leverages a comparative approach to understand how conspiracy theories and their believers differ within and across countries. Using original survey data from eight varied cases (Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Lebanon, Morocco, South Africa, and the United States) the authors present specific contemporary conspiracy theories, illustrate how these theories appeal in their national context, and determine whether the characteristics of the typical conspiracy theory believer vary across setting. They first demonstrate that there is a wide range of conspiracy theories, some of which have worldwide reach, whereas others are more context specific. Then, they show that the determinants of individual conspiracism are very similar in the Western world and Brazil, but do not necessarily travel to Lebanon, Morocco and South Africa. Lastly, they summarize the main conclusions of this Element and discuss the need for greater comparative research on conspiracy theories and propose clear areas for future research.
Louise Lowe is a theatre and performance director, writer, choreographer, dramaturge, and, more recently, a television director and short film writer/director, working in Ireland and internationally. She is the Co-Artistic Director of ANU Productions, established with Owen Boss in Dublin in 2009. Lowe is known for facilitating and creating moments of interior reckoning for audiences through immersive performance techniques. These techniques engage spectators in affectively realised moments of understanding that the stories unfolding through performance reflect living histories in need of greater socio-political engagement and intervention. This Element assesses Lowe's creative practice and production history since her days as a drama facilitator in women's prisons and resource centres in Dublin, paying particular attention to the economic struggle of Dublin's north inner-city, the markings of which are potently visible in the work she makes, and how she makes it. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.