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2068 results in Cambridge Elements

Page 9 of 104

Santa Muerte Devotion

Santa Muerte Devotion
  • Vulnerability, Protection, Intimacy
  • Wil G. Pansters
  • Published online:
    24 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 March 2025
  • In recent decades the cult of Santa Muerte has become a remarkable phenomenon in Mexico's popular religious landscape, from where it has migrated abroad. Due to the uncommon iconography of the robed skeleton and the association with criminality, the Santa Muerte cult has been the object of public controversy. This Element deconstructs mainstream views of Santa Muerte devotion by privileging the voices and practices of devotees. Counterintuitively, Santa Muerte devotion is about assuring a good life in health, work, love, justice, and security. Notwithstanding the cult's rapid growth and public visibility since 2000, it is deeply embedded in Mexico's religious and cultural history. The analysis of material culture, theology, and ritual demonstrates the importance of devotional intimacy. This Element also studies how gender, family, leadership, and political relations intersect with the cult. Santa Muerte popular religiosity is examined in terms of socioeconomic vulnerabilities, ineffective social protections, exclusion, and existential insecurities.
Political Representation as Communicative Practice

Political Representation as Communicative Practice
  • Fabio Wolkenstein, Christopher Wratil
  • Published online:
    24 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 March 2025
  • It is uncontroversial that the quality of democracy is closely bound up with the quality of political representation. But what exactly is political representation and how should we study it? This Element develops a novel conceptual framework for studying political representation that makes the insights of recent theoretical work on representation usable for quantitative empirical research. The theoretical literature the authors build on makes the case for changing the understanding of representation in two ways. First, it proposes to conceive representation in constructivist terms, as a practice that is shaped by both representatives and represented. Second, it treats communicative acts by representatives that address constituents and different analytical dimensions contained in them as the central categories of analysis; political representation is thus conceived as an essentially communicative practice. This Element argues that quantitative research can benefit from taking these innovations seriously, and it provides the conceptual tools for doing so.
<i>Lettera amorosa</i>

Lettera amorosa
  • Musical Love-Letters in Early Modern Italy
  • Roseen Giles
  • Published online:
    21 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • In early modern Italy, letters were not only written and read but, in some cases, sung. Musical settings of love letters rekindled a complex kind of vocality which was rooted in the letters of antiquity and endured in the musical sub-genre of the lettera amorosa. Epistolary poetry served to transform, or, to echo Achillini's lettera set by Monteverdi (1567–1643), to 'distill' a lover's thoughts and emotions into verse, and the music that set it was equally transformative. The history of musical letters spans several centuries. It begins in the early sixteenth with a setting of Ovid's Heroides by Tromboncino; returns in the early seventeenth through the lettere amorose of Monteverdi, D'India, and Frescobaldi; and ends with epistolary cantatas by Carissimi, Melani, and Domenico Scarlatti. This Element traces the breadth and significance of the musical love letter with a focus on the provocative lettere amorose of the seventeenth century.
Teaching Second Language Academic Writing

Teaching Second Language Academic Writing
  • Christine M. Tardy
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • This Element offers readers an overview of the theory, research, and practice of teaching academic writing to second language/multilingual (L2) students. The Element begins with a discussion of contextual features and some of the most common settings in which L2AW is taught. The Element then defines and shares examples of several concepts, pedagogical approaches, and teaching practices that are particularly relevant to L2AW instruction. Reflective questions guide readers to consider how these aspects of L2AW might be carried out within their own educational settings. Finally, the Element considers the rapid changes in technology and their influences on texts and academic writing.
Subsidiarity

Subsidiarity
  • Andreas Follesdal
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • 'Subsidiarity' is vague and contested, yet popular in scholarship about international law due to its role in the European Union (EU). Which conceptions of subsidiarity are more justifiable, and how might they contribute to international law? A principle of subsidiarity concerns how to establish, allocate, or use authority within a social or legal order, stating a rebuttable presumption for the local. Various historical patterns, practices, principles, and justifications offer different recommendations. Seven normative theories vary in how immunity protecting or person promoting they are. The latter appear more justifiable and withstand criticism often raised against subsidiarity. Some conceptions of person promoting subsidiarity serve as a structuring principle for international law and fullfills several criteria of a general principle of law. It can harmonize domestic and international law but is not sufficient to reduce fragmentation among sectors with different objectives.
Affective Touching

Affective Touching
  • Neurobiology and Technological Applications
  • Mark Paterson
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • At the end of the twentieth century the discovery of 'slow', affective touch nerves in humans known as C Tactile (CT) afferents, which are entirely separate from the faster pathways for touching objects, had huge social implications. The Swedish neuroscientists responsible formulated an “affective touch hypothesis” or “social touch hypothesis” to consider their purpose. Part I offers a history of the science of social touch, from related discoveries in mammals by physiologists in the 1930s, to the recent rediscoveries of the CT nerves in humans. Part II considers how these findings are being intentionally folded into technologies for interaction. First, as mediated social touch, communicating at a distance through haptics. Second, with the increasing number of social and service robots in health care and domestic settings, the role of affective touch within human-robot interaction design.
Hegel and Heidegger on Time

Hegel and Heidegger on Time
  • Ioannis Trisokkas
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    06 March 2025
  • This Element discusses Heidegger's early (1924–1931) reading and critique of Hegel, which revolve around the topic of time. The standard view is that Heidegger distances himself from Hegel by arguing that whereas he takes time to be 'originarily' Dasein's 'temporality,' Hegel has a 'vulgar' conception of time as 'now-time' (the succession of formal nows). The Element defends the thesis that while this difference concerning the nature of time is certainly a part of Heidegger's 'confrontation' with Hegel, it is not its kernel. What Heidegger aspired to convey with his Hegel-critique is that they have a divergent conception of man's understanding of being (ontology). Whereas Heidegger takes ontology to be grounded in temporality, Hegel thinks it is grounded in 'the concept,' which has a dimension ('logos') manifesting eternity or timelessness. It is argued, contra Kojève, that Heidegger's reading (but not necessarily his critique) of Hegel is, in an important respect, correct.
Contemporary Non-Positivism

Contemporary Non-Positivism
  • Emad H. Atiq
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • This Element defends and clarifies the thesis that the legality of a system of rules depends on its moral features. Positivists who deny this dependence struggle to explain: (1) the traditional classification of moral norms as a form of a priori law; (2) judicial reliance on moral norms in legal discovery; (3) persistent theoretical disagreement about intra-systemic, law-determining facts; (4) why radically arbitrary or immoral schemes of social organization represent borderline cases of law; and (5) why law, like other artifacts, can be evaluated in a kind-relative sense (“as law”). Meanwhile, traditional versions of non-positivism overstate the dependence going further than the desiderata warrant. A moderate theory is formulated: law is an artifact whose existence depends on adequately performing an essentially normative function. The theory's justification lies in its explanatory power: a comparison with other “value-driven” artifacts, such as artworks, proves vital for understanding legal language, reasoning, and practice.
Scientific Realism

Scientific Realism
  • Timothy D. Lyons
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
  • The scientific realism debate directly addresses the relation between human thought and the reality in which it finds itself. A core question: Can we justifiably believe that science accurately describes the reality that lies beneath the limits of human experience? Exploring this question, this Element begins at the most foundational level of scientific realism, the endeavor to justify belief in the existence of unobservables by way of abduction. Raising anti-realist challenges, some much discussed in the literature but also some generally overlooked, it works its way toward more refined variants of scientific realism. Because scientific realism is the default position of many scientific realists themselves often assuming it is the default position of scientists– the emphasis will be on the challenges. Those challenges will also motivate the variants of scientific realism traced. The Element concludes with a brief articulation of the author's own position, Socratic scientific realism.
Central Asia - Russia's Near Abroad or Crossroads of Asia?

Central Asia - Russia's Near Abroad or Crossroads of Asia?
  • Richard Pomfret
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • This Element assesses the claim that Central Asian countries hold a special position as Russia's near abroad. The region has been important for millennia, and only after conquest in the second half of the nineteenth century did Russia become important for Central Asia. This connection became stronger after 1917 as Central Asia was integrated into the Soviet economy, with rail, roads, and pipelines all leading north to Russia. After independence, these connections were gradually modified by new trade links and by new infrastructure, while Russia's demand for unskilled labour during the 1999–2014 oil boom created a new economic dependency for Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic. In 1991, political independence could not be accompanied by economic independence, but over the next three decades economic dependence on Russia was reduced, and the Central Asian countries have felt increasingly able to adopt political positions independent of Russia.
The League of Nations

The League of Nations
  • Joseph Maiolo, Laura Robson
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 February 2025
    • Element
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  • The Element challenges histories of the League of Nations that present it as a meaningful if flawed experiment in global governance. Such accounts have largely failed to admit its overriding purpose: not to work towards international cooperation among equally sovereign states, but to claim control over the globe's resources, weapons, and populations for its main showrunners (including the United States) – and not through the gentle arts of persuasion and negotiation but through the direct and indirect use of force and the monopolisation of global military and economic power. The League's advocates framed its innovations, from refugee aid to disarmament, as manifestations of its commitment to an obvious universal good and, often, as a series of technocratic, scientific solutions to the problems of global disorder. But its practices shored up the dominance of the western victors and preserved longstanding structures of international power and civilizational-racial hierarchy. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Scholarly Editing in Perspective

Scholarly Editing in Perspective
  • Wim Van Mierlo
  • Published online:
    20 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
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  • Scholarly Editing in Perspective offers a critical reflection on the theory and methods of textual editing, as a contribution to a wider, comparative understanding of editorial practice. The analysis, written in a cogent, concise and accessible manner, offers an insight into the textual-philosophical principles and foundations of scholarly editing from the beginning of the twentieth century to the new opportunities offered by digital technologies in the twenty-first. Scholarly editing is presented as a process that makes an intervention in the text whereby the editor mediates between competing versions of textuality, authorship, and authority. In analysing the assumptions, beliefs, and critical underpinnings of scholarly editing, this Element provides a new perspective on the standard editorial models within the English tradition, how they have evolved, and how they are adapted for the digital age.
Maximos the Confessor

Maximos the Confessor
  • Androprimacy and Sexual Difference
  • Luis Josué Salés
  • Published online:
    18 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • Maximos affirms in various texts (such as Difficulty 41) that sexual differentiation into male and female is inconsistent with the divine intention and will therefore be eschatologically eradicated. His affirmations have elicited a half-dozen conflicting interpretations, such as the metaphorization of these statements, where 'male' refers to drive (thymos) and 'female' to desire (epithymia), which become subordinate to reason (logos). Others maintain that he refers to the resolution of male–female agonistics. Yet others have criticized accounts that mollify the starkness of Maximos' affirmations. This Element goes further in arguing that Maximos tacitly envisions the elimination of sexual difference as sublimation of all sexual difference into male singularity. This Element overviews the exegetical and medical-anthropological precedents that framed Maximos thinking on this subject and examines some of his key texts, including his famed Difficulty 41 and several passages centered on explicating Eve and Adam, and Mary and Christ.
The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling

The Form and Theory of Literary Doodling
  • Jeremiah R. Mercurio, Daniel Gabelman
  • Published online:
    18 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
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  • This Element investigates the phenomenon of literary doodling—the making of playful verbal and visual creations by professional authors while engaged in another activity. The first part focuses on defining the form and structure of doodles, comparing and contrasting them with adjacent genres such as sketches, caricatures, and illustrations. The second part explores the modality of doodling, examining doodles through the lenses of spectrality, liminality, and play. Drawing on a wide range of theories and backed up with numerous close readings, the Element argues that doodles, despite their apparent triviality, provide valuable insights into the creative processes, authorial habits, and finished works of literary doodlers. Ultimately, this study aims to legitimise doodles as worthy of serious critical attention, demonstrating how they trouble the meaning of texts, introduce semantic flexibility into literary works and their reception, and rejuvenate the joy of readerly discovery.
Reduction, Emergence and the Metaphysics in Science

Reduction, Emergence and the Metaphysics in Science
  • Carl Gillett
  • Published online:
    18 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • This Element offers a fresh treatment of the two cycles of reduction-emergence debates in the sciences and their 'reductionist' and 'emergentist' positions. It suggests philosophers have neglected the compositional models/explanations, and 'endogenous' kind of metaphysics, central to these debates. It highlights how such endogenous metaphysics underpins what is termed the 'Dynamic Cycle,' by which scientists develop novel ontological concepts to underwrite new models/explanations to solve scientific problems. And it subsequently shows that the 'reductionist' and 'emergentist' views in the scientific debates follow the Dynamic Cycle. In the first cycle of debates, in the early twentieth century, the Element outlines how 'everyday reductionism' pioneered a novel family of compositional models/explanations in one of the most successful research movements in twentieth-century science. And, in present debates, it frames contemporary emergentist positions offering ontological innovations, underwriting new families of models, to address problems at the cutting-edge of twenty-first-century science.
Learning from COVID-19 for Climate-Ready Urban Transformation

Learning from COVID-19 for Climate-Ready Urban Transformation
  • Darshini Mahadevia, Gian C. Delgado-Ramos, Janice Barnes, Joan Fitzgerald, Miho Kamei, Kevin Lanza, William Solecki, Minal Pathak, Martha Barata, Aliyu Salisu Barau, Maria Dombrov, Cynthia Rosenzweig
  • Published online:
    17 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
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  • Cities have suffered from three years of the COVID-19 pandemic and are increasingly experiencing exacerbated heatwaves, floods, and droughts due to climate change. Going forward, cities need to address both climate and public health crises effectively while reducing poverty and inequity, often in the context of economic pressure and declining levels of trust in government. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in city readiness for simultaneous responses to pandemics and climate change, particularly in the Global South. However, these concurrent challenges to cities present an opportunity to reformulate current urbanization patterns and the economies and dynamics they enable. This Element focuses on understanding COVID-19's impact on city systems related to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and vice versa, in terms of warnings, lessons learned, and calls to action. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Muslim Women in Science, Past and Present

Muslim Women in Science, Past and Present
  • Elmira Akhmetova
  • Published online:
    17 February 2025
    Print publication:
    20 March 2025
  • This Element examines issues related to Muslim women's engagement in science and scholarship both past and present. The first two parts discuss the contributions made by Muslim women to scholarly, scientific, and technological advancements. The third part discusses the factors that have contributed to a decline in Muslim women's scholarly involvement in Islamic civilisation, the veracity of historical accounts, and the constraints in original knowledge production in contemporary Muslim societies. It finds that there are no religious restrictions rooted in the Qur'an that forbid women from pursuing a profession in science, whether as learners or practitioners. Yet some economic and political circumstances, cultural influences, and outdated interpretations of Islam produce discrimination against women in Muslim societies, and lead to their underrepresentation in scientific research and academia.
The Problem of God in Buddhism

The Problem of God in Buddhism
  • Signe Cohen
  • Published online:
    17 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025
  • Since Buddhism does not include a belief in a personal god instrumental to the creation of the world or to human salvation, it is often assumed that gods play no part in Buddhism at all. This Element complicates the simplistic assessment of Buddhism as an 'atheistic religion' and discusses the various roles deities play in Buddhist texts and practice. The Problem of God in Buddhism includes a comprehensive analysis of the Buddhist refutations of a creator God, the idea of salvation without divine intervention, the role of minor deities in Buddhism, the question of whether Buddhas and Bodhisattvas can function as gods in certain forms of Buddhism, and the notion of the sacred as apart from the divine in Buddhist traditions.
About Suffering

About Suffering
  • On Louise Glück
  • Christos Hadjiyiannis
  • Published online:
    17 February 2025
    Print publication:
    13 March 2025
  • Poetry has always courted suffering. Poets sing their suffering, we've been told, and there can be no poetry without suffering. Louise Glück wasn't too sure about that. Suffering features centrally in her poetry and she discussed its role in poetry in her critical writing, where she often retained the language of poetry as martyrdom. However, she was keen to stress that suffering's part in composition has been misplaced and misunderstood, its function idealised and fetishised. Surveying a wide range of texts about poetry's relationship to suffering, and drawing surprising links between very different voices, this book situates Glück both in the tradition of Rainer Maria Rilke's lyrical suffering and in the tradition of T. S. Eliot's impersonal approach to poetry. Glück's most powerful and characteristic discussion of suffering, it argues, takes place in her 1992 volume, The Wild Iris.
Evolution and the Fate of Humankind

Evolution and the Fate of Humankind
  • Peter A. Corning
  • Published online:
    15 February 2025
    Print publication:
    27 February 2025
  • In recent years we have come to understand better the forces that have shaped biological evolution over the course of time. Evolved purposiveness (teleonomy) in living systems themselves has been an important influence. Cooperative effects (synergies) of various kinds have also been influential. And the bioeconomics (functional costs and benefits) have been important constraints. Now we are facing a mounting survival crisis that may determine the future of life on Earth. We need to make a major course change, utilizing our insights into these important influences. Here is a review, and a 'prescription.'

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