bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Ancient Near Eastern Canon in the University Classroom, and Beyond
Authors: Shafer Ann
Published: February 2020

This chapter focuses on the university classroom as an opportunity to create dynamic change in Ancient Near Eastern Studies. Through interviews with specialists, three main trajectories emerge. First, scholars discuss their own backgrounds and their experiences as students and instructors. This discussion is framed by reflections upon early twenty-first century educational trends and speculations about the future. Second, the same scholars discuss their innovative teaching methods, highlighting hands-on, collaborative learning. Here, the chapter reflects upon the evolving nature of audiences and knowledge consumption, and brainstorms new teaching strategies. The third section contains a case study in innovative pedagogy, and ultimately is a rallying cry for the relevance of the ancient canon. Here the chapter looks at the ancient Near East through the lens of contemporary art, a viewpoint that raises direct questions about the parameters of the canon itself and simultaneously about those politically unresolved and thus destabilizing issues that continue to mark the field.
Between Hazor and Masada
Authors: Avni Gideon
Published: February 2020

This chapter explains the link between remains from “biblical” and classical times and modern Israel as a significant theme in constructing local identities. Excavations of sites of the Bronze and Iron Ages yielded new monuments and artifacts that were occasionally used for the creation of a new collective memory for modern Israelis, and the epic excavations at Masada conducted by Yigael Yadin in the 1960s became a significant landmark in the creation of a collective memory linking modern Israel to its past. However, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries evinced profound changes in the attitude of Israelis toward archaeology. A constant decline in the status of archaeology as a national emblem has occurred as part of major changes in Israeli society.
Earth, Rocks, and Blood
Authors: Donabed Sargon George
Published: February 2020

The tale presented in this chapter illustrates a symbiosis between land and identity, and heritage and culture, as seen through the eyes of a young Assyrian woman living in Boston, Massachusetts. From identity appropriation to abject denial, the antagonist, an embodiment of the legacy of Mesopotamia, experiences the lives of her dispossessed community in what appears to be a waking dream. It is a story of the elephant in the room from the perspective of a people who see culture and heritage and home in a vastly different light—through experience. This story describes a community navigating an ongoing existential threat somewhere between apathy and empathy toward inevitability with but a small rudder of hope.
6,000 Years
Authors: Farhat Maymanah
Published: February 2020

In Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, and Iraq millions of people live among ruins. First, there are the archaeological sites of the ancient civilizations that settled the area, which rural and urban communities have grown around. These spaces were crucial to how local cultural heritage was conceptualized in the twentieth century, as artists, writers, and thinkers formulated postcolonial aesthetics. At the same time, there are the remnants of modern-day wars: pockmarked buildings, bombed neighborhoods, and makeshift memorials that serve as the physical reminders of catastrophic events and the precarious conditions of everyday life in the region. In both cases, ruins reflect the failure of political systems, the neglect of people, and the privileging of individual power over sustained collectivity, not to mention insurmountable loss. This chapter explores how visual artists make these links by appropriating the imagery of ancient artifacts in works that address recent conflicts.
Crafting the Ancient Near Eastern Canon
Authors: Kamash Zena
Published: February 2020

This chapter offers a personal reflection on two projects that seek to find alternative ways to respond to Middle Eastern heritage: “Remembering the Romans in the Middle East and North Africa” and “Rematerialising Mosul Museum.” Both projects aim to provide ways for people to rejuvenate friendships with heritage objects through a range of craft and art practices (felting, drawing, photograph, and creative writing). This chapter reflects on the author’s own crafted responses and uses these to explore how crafting can help people think more deeply about how they relate to the canon as individuals and how they might use crafting to make their own personal canon. In particular, this chapter thinks through why practices of this kind are important to the author as a person who is a British Iraqi, as well as an archaeologist.
Contemporary Art and Archaeology in the Arab World
Authors: Mikdadi Salwa
Published: February 2020

Contemporary Arab artists are increasingly engaging with the past to make sense of present-day issues. Mining historical regional archives for inspiration, they are placing ancient art and archaeology at the center of their research for art projects and exhibitions. This engagement continues a trend that started in the early decades of the twentieth century, when Egyptian and Iraqi artists employed archaeology in the construction of national narratives, re-appropriating ancient art from its colonial construct—its iconic images of the exotic Orient—to serve the emerging nation states. Twenty-first-century artists are now reflecting upon the discipline of Archaeology and examining the politics of excavations and the display and interpretation of historical artifacts. This chapter presents examples of diverse approaches and techniques in contemporary art that explore archaeological and museological practices in the context of current sociopolitical and economic concerns.
Clever drummers, primitivism, entrepreneurialism, and the invention of the trap drummer’s outfit
Authors: Brennan Matt
Published: February 2020

This chapter documents the prehistory of drum kit performance practice and the invention of the trap drummer’s outfit. First, it examines the impact of the transatlantic slave trade on American musical culture. Second, it explores the history of the snare drum, bass drum, and cymbals, and how they come together in ensemble performance. Third, it discusses the emergence of highbrow and lowbrow culture and the consequences for the status of drummers. Fourth, it discusses the types of music that a drummer was likely to play working in nineteenth-century USA. Fifth, it examines the tinkerers, inventors, and entrepreneurs who developed the key components of the early drum kit, known in its time as the ‘trap drummer’s outfit’.
Conclusion
Authors: Brennan Matt
Published: February 2020

In explaining his move away from radio-oriented pop music, songwriter Nick Lowe once recalled in an interview that he had successfully escaped from ‘the tyranny of the snare drum’. This comment resonated with some musicians presumably because it expressed an uneasiness regarding the drum kit’s slow and steady ascent in the aesthetics of record mixes. The drummer’s status has arguably shifted over history from a position of conspicuous absence and ‘hanging around with musicians’ to a position of ‘tyranny’ where the freedom of contemporary commercial songwriting is restricted through a conservative reliance on a 4/4 beat, rigidly enforced by a regime of kick and snare. This chapter discusses area for future research on the drum kit.
Play
Authors: Gordon Eric , Mugar Gabriel
Published: February 2020

Play is the precondition of civic action taking. This chapter explores what it means when people play and how the creation of trusted, accessible, and inclusive play spaces is central to civic design. Distinct from gamification, civic design looks for games to structure play, creating less, not more, efficiencies in systems. With an extended case study of a project involving the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, which invited Boston youth into questioning and changing the game’s data, the chapter explores how play can inform and shape civic life.
A Trilogy of Ngawang Palden and Shedrub Tendar
Authors: Erdene-Ochir ErdeneBaatar
Published: February 2020

“A Trilogy of Ngawang Palden and Shedrub Tendar” consists of three works composed by two Khalkha Mongolian Buddhist scholars, Ngawang Palden (1797–1864) and Shedrub Tendar (1835–1915). The trilogy consists of versified eulogies to the three aspects of the mind: the mind of enlightenment, the correct view, and renunciation, while pointing to various Buddhist doctrinal views and tales mentioned in various Indian sources. The authors were trained in a Mongolian Buddhist institution and eventually became highly respected scholars in the Buddhist scholastic circle of the Géluk world. In this regard, their works rightfully represent the nineteenth-century Mongolian Buddhist literature composed by then educated monastics.
Čaqar Gebši Luvsančültem’s Offering Ritual to the Fire God
Authors: Norov Batsaikhan , Usukhbayar Batchimeg
Published: February 2020

Gebši Luvsančültem (1740–1810), born in Čaqar of current Inner Mongolia, authored hundreds of texts on various subjects in Buddhism, and dedicated all his life to the development of Buddhism. In his texts, nomadic Mongolian lifestyle and culture were widely reflected and syncretized with Buddhist rituals. As he was not only a Buddhist scholar but also a famous medical practitioner, Luvsančültem documented smallpox inoculation and other newly spread infectious diseases among Mongols for the first time. Many of his works are also related to the nāga deity and devil’s wickedness, and to treatments for the unhappy spirits. One of the best examples of them is an offering ritual to the fire, which has two versions, written in Tibetan and Mongolian. Interestingly, the fire deity was described differently in these two versions. In the Mongolian version, the fire deity is appeared as a pleasant looking White Old Man whereas in the Tibetan version who is visualized as fierce imaged God with three faces and six armes. In addition, the fire offering ritual was recognized by traditional medical practitioners as one of the last, most effective, and fierce rituals for nāga spirits that are associated with diseases, when other rituals such as water rituals and sacrificial cake offerings do not show efficacy.
Three Ritual Prayers by Öndör Gegeen Zanabazar
Authors: Majer Zsuzsa
Published: February 2020

This chapter covers three main works of Öndör Gegeen Zanabazar (1635–1723), who was the first head of Mongolian Buddhism. All three prayers translated in this chapter were composed in the Tibetan language. The first of them remains the most important prayer in the daily practice of Mongolian Buddhists, thus being the main prayer of Mongolian Buddhism in general, in which the texts of different Tibetan Buddhist traditions and lineages are otherwise used. The second translated prayer is a food offering text, often used in tantric rituals, and the third prayer is connected to a mantra recitation and the sādhana (“method of realization”) of Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. It contains a profound tantric doctrinal meaning and is closely related to the soyombo writing system created by Öndör Gegeen Zanabazar himself.
Stories of the Prophets
Authors: Khatun Samia
Published: February 2020

Approaching the 1895 edition of the Bengali Kasasol Ambia that remains in a Broken Hill mosque as a history book, this chapter examines the historical storytelling techniques that this Sufi text employs. I argue that this particular non-modern history book was underpinned by a relationship between humans and knowledge – an epistemology - quite distinct to colonial modern methods of truth production. The chapter makes a methodological argument for animating and reinvigorating non-modern strategies for producing truths about the past and claims continuity to non-modern historiographical traditions.
The Book of Sand
Authors: Khatun Samia
Published: February 2020

Chapter 6, examines an Arabunna story of encounter at a lonely railway siding in South Australian deserts in around 1895. The tale of what happened when two South Asian men met two Aboriginal women at Alberrie Creek continues to circulate in Arabunna families today. I undertake a camping trip through South Australian deserts with Reg Dodd, the Chairman of the Arabunna People’s Committee, and show that these Arabunna histories of South Asians can offer glimpses of the terrain on which Arabunna historiographical traditions are inscribed.
Failure and Resistance
Authors: Kaye Alexander
Published: February 2020

The attempts of religious Zionists to establish halakha as the law of Israel failed. This chapter examines the response of religious Zionist leaders to this failure, and their bitter resentment of Israel’s secular legal institutions that, in their view, had usurped halakhic rule. It shows that, resigned to these circumstances, religious Zionists adopted a double strategy. Among themselves, they persevered in their commitment to the idea of the halakhic state. When speaking to others, however, they embraced a more pragmatic position. In Knesset speeches, for example, they argued for a pluralistic position in which the rabbinical courts would have equal authority to the state’s secular courts. The chapter also shows how the legal rhetoric of religious Zionists, particularly of Zerah Warhaftig, shored up the identity of the community during the time of setback.
Sergio Leone’s Short Century
Authors: Uva Christian
Published: February 2020

This chapter focuses on the eccentric and heterogeneous experiences, interests, and influences that contributed to the development of Sergio Leone’s authorial identity, particularly in the sword-and-sandal and Spaghetti Western genres. It investigates the exceptional intersection of cultural, technical, stylistic, and ideological influences coming from different, often contradictory, directions, creating a complete portrait of the artist. The chapter provides an overview of Leone’s career, and it also emphasizes his experience in roles other than that of film director, from assistant director on De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves and many Hollywood epics, to producer of films such as My Name is Nobody (1973) by Tonino Valerii and Fun is Beautiful (1980) by Carlo Verdone. The chapter therefore reconstructs Leone’s background and puts it into communication with the historical, cultural, and cinematic national and international contexts from Fascism up to the director’s death in 1989.
Cinema between Fable and Political Mythology
Authors: Uva Christian
Published: February 2020

This chapter discusses the theoretical and critical substance of Sergio Leone’s filmography, referencing modern and postmodern thinkers. It argues that the conceptual foundation of Leone’s cinema is a postmodern attempt to deconstruct complexity through the collapse of universal narratives (Enlightenment, Idealism, and Marxism), using irony and allusions to catastrophic events such as concentration camps, war, and revolution. The chapter illustrates Leone’s approach to cinema in relation to his experience between popular and political film, labeling his work “political spectacle.” It then elaborates Leone’s politics in relation to the two major thinkers who most influenced the director: Antonio Gramsci and Ernst Jünger (including Gramsci’s “national-popular” concept). This chapter analyzes Leone’s work—his début, The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), the “Dollars Trilogy,” and the “Once Upon a Time Trilogy”—chronologically, indicating the evolution of his work and its references to Italian and American history, from Fascism to the Vietnam War.
The Welfare State on Autopilot
Authors: Stoesz David
Published: February 2020

The Welfare State emerged during industrialization as a means to ensure the protection of citizens from illness, unemployment, and destitution. Yet, government social program commitments vary across nations, with some less affluent countries performing better than their more affluent counterparts, as demonstrated in league tables. Originating in medicine, the evidence-based policy movement has extended to the social arena, showing how public investments can produce public benefit. However, reviewing extant programs with regard to efficacy and efficiency has lagged.
Arnold Ventures
Authors: Stoesz David
Published: February 2020

Arnold Ventures, previously the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, incorporated the Coalition for Evidence-based Policy, begun by Jon Baron, in order to promote research in social programming. At the same time, the Pew Charitable Trust and the MacArthur Foundation used the Washington State Institute for Public Policy’s cost–benefit capacity to encourage states to deploy evidence-based programming. By the 2017, Arnold Ventures was committed to fund any credible randomized controlled trial to enhance services. The evidence movement culminated in the 2018 Evidence-based Policymaking Act, which requires federal agencies to develop an evaluation plan along with statistical and advisory capability in addition to standards to which states and private firms must comply in order to receive federal funds.
American Development Accounts
Authors: Stoesz David
Published: February 2020

Because most benefits for poor Americans focus on income, wealth is rarely considered. While inequality due to income has widened, wealth inequality has become a chasm, impeding families from accruing assets necessary for prosperity. American Development Accounts are based on Individual Development Accounts, but with a default opt-in proviso for young workers. Increasing wealth for new entrants to the labor force is essential for the prosperity of their families and their communities.
Introduction
Authors: Ng Karen
Published: February 2020

This chapter provides an introduction to the main arguments and themes of the book. It presents three central claims: first, that the core tenets of Hegel’s philosophy, and in particular Hegel’s “Concept,” should be understood as developing around a purposiveness theme deriving from Kant’s third Critique; second, that the speculative identity thesis is key for Hegel’s overarching philosophical method and can be understood as a relationship between life and self-conscious cognition; and third, that Hegel’s Subjective Logic can be read as his version of a critique of judgment. This chapter also provides arguments against two prominent interpretations of the trajectory from Kant to Hegel: one that revolves around a self-consciousness theme, and one that revolves around the importance of the intuitive understanding. It then provides chapter outlines for the remainder of the book.
Life as Ground, and the Limits of the Subjective Concept
Authors: Ng Karen
Published: February 2020

Chapter 5 argues that the Subjective Logic can be read as Hegel’s “critique of judgment” by turning to the importance of Hölderlin. Adopting Hölderlin’s understanding of judgment as “original division,” Hegel traces the ground of judgment not to the original unity of “Being” but to what he calls “the original judgment of life” (das ursprüngliche Urteil des Lebens). What this denotes is an original form of activity, an original division and unity, that opens up intelligibility as such. This chapter argues that organic unity and form provide a standard for the unity and form of Concept, judgment, and syllogism. The key to this argument hinges on Hegel’s understanding of Gattung-concepts (a genus, species, or kind) as the objective, universal context of judgment. The chapter provides a detailed analysis of the “Judgment” chapter in particular, and argues that what Hegel calls the judgment of the Concept (essentially, evaluative judgments) is modeled on Kant’s understanding of reflective, teleological judgments.
Silence and social interaction
Authors: Hoey Elliott M.
Published: February 2020

This chapter introduces the relevant literature and themes that are developed in the following chapters. It provides a select review of research on silence from various humanistic and social scientific perspectives, giving special attention to studies of acoustic silence as such. It then focuses on silence as it’s been examined in the discipline of conversation analysis. In surveying work on silence in conversation analysis (specifically on pauses, gaps, and lapses), several omissions, underspecifications, and ambiguities are assembled as a way to build a rationale for an extended examination of lapses. The chapter then proceeds to state the aims and main questions of the book, sketches the conversation analytic methods that are used in the empirical studies, describes the data, and summarizes the remaining chapters.
The Origins of Informality
Authors: Roger Charles B.
Published: February 2020

This book explores the phenomenon of informal international organizations. These bodies are involved in governing many of the most important issues the world currently faces, and differ significantly from the highly legalized, formal organizations the world has traditionally relied on. But despite their evident importance, they remain poorly understood. This book develops a new approach to thinking about these puzzling institutions, presents new data revealing their extraordinary growth over time, and develops a novel theory about why states are creating them. The theory explains how states form preferences over the informality of international organization and how legal designs get chosen through often contentious bargaining processes. This theory of institutional design then informs a more dynamic account of the rise of informality. This account explains how major shifts occurring in the domestic political arenas of powerful states—especially growing polarization and the rise of the regulatory state—have been projected outward and reshaped the legal foundations of global governance. The book systematically tests this theory, quantitatively and qualitatively, and presents detailed accounts of the forces behind some of the most important institutions in the global economy. It concludes with an analysis of the effectiveness of informal organizations, finding that many are likely to be less capable of addressing the complex challenges the world presently confronts.
The Move to Informality
Authors: Roger Charles B.
Published: February 2020

Informal organizations are the most visible dimension of a vast informal order that has been taking shape since the 1970s and 1980s. They are, however, its least understood component. The book explores why states create these puzzling institutions and why they have grown so significantly over time and assesses what this means for states’ ability to govern cross-border issues effectively. This chapter introduces the central themes of the book and reviews the answers it offers. Specifically, this chapter explains how the book conceptualizes the idea of an informal organization, how the book accounts for the design choices of states in particular scenarios, and how the “two-step” account the book develops can be extended to offer a “dynamic” explanation of the rise of informality. The main alternative explanations are also elaborated, and the central axes of the policy debate about informality are discussed.
Speak of the Devil
Authors: Laycock Joseph P.
Published: February 2020

Since it was founded in 2013, The Satanic Temple has spread across the United States and throughout the world. Unlike other forms of Satanism, The Satanic Temple is highly politically active. It has invoked religious freedom to campaign for easier access to abortion, exemption from laws that allow administering corporal punishment to students, and implementing Satanic after-school clubs in elementary schools. While this group remains highly controversial, it is poorly understood. This book provides a detailed history of The Satanic Temple’s history, beliefs, and culture as well as the numerous political and legal battles this group has undertaken. The author suggests that the lasting impact of The Satanic Temple is the way their campaigns have affected national conversations about such topics as the definition of religion, religious freedom, and religious tolerance.
Satanic Schisms
Authors: Laycock Joseph P.
Published: February 2020

This chapter analyzes controversies within The Satanic Temple that led to a series of schisms in the summer of 2018. The schisms reflected larger national issues that have divided progressive groups, including disagreements about how best to respond to dangers posed by the “alt-right” movement, disagreements about the nature and value of free speech, and different philosophies of how to advance social justice. The author suggests that religious schisms are a normal part of a religious movement’s development. In this case, the schisms were likely inevitable as The Satanic Temple lacks organizational features that sociologists have shown tend to discourage religious schisms.
Religion or Trolls?
Authors: Laycock Joseph P.
Published: February 2020

Many of The Satanic Temple’s political campaigns and legal actions depend on invoking their religious rights. However, critics have responded that The Satanic Temple is not a “real” religion but merely “trolls” who only pretend to have sincerely held beliefs. These critics typically point out that The Satanic Temple do not believe in a literal Satan or any supernatural force. This argument featured prominently when The Satanic Temple sued the state of Missouri over its abortion laws. This chapter makes several theoretical interventions into this controversy. First, the category of “invented religions” is helpful for thinking about how The Satanic Temple can be sincere despite lacking supernatural beliefs. Second, it is argued that The Satanic Temple possesses characteristics common to more familiar religions. Finally, it is suggested that the very act of invoking religious liberty has caused Satanists to think about their worldviews differently.
Biodiversity
Authors: Randall Nicola P. , Smith Barbara
Published: February 2020

This chapter discusses biodiversity in farming systems, including a consideration of the ecological importance of non-agricultural habitats within farm systems. The chapter outlines patterns of biodiversity in space and time, as well as at varying levels (genetic, organismal, landscape), before exploring the impact of agriculture on biodiversity at local, regional, and global scales. Farmland is an artificial environment, often characterized by monocultures grown at a density that differs from natural growth patterns. This can generate instability, resistance to environmental change, susceptibility to pests, pollution, and impacts on other ecosystem services such as soil and water. The chapter ends with a discussion of the biological implications of continued agricultural change (e.g. specialization, intensification).
Future Perspectives
Authors: Randall Nicola P. , Smith Barbara
Published: February 2020

This final chapter explores the future challenges for agroecosystem biology. Factors such as population growth and the requirement for increased agricultural production are considered, alongside environmental factors such as climate change. The chapter explores the potential encroachment of new farmland into natural habitats and the limiting factors for agricultural growth (such as land and water availability). The use of new developments to overcome these limiting factors to agricultural growth is discussed. The chapter concludes with consideration of the potential biological impacts of further expansion and change to global agriculture, and of the implications of agricultural management on biological and other environmental factors.
Interactive Political Leadership
Authors: Sørensen Eva
Published: February 2020

In what this book boldly defines as the age of governance, citizens and other relevant and affected stakeholders are active partakers in governing Western liberal societies. This reality is out of tune with traditional sovereign perceptions of political leadership. Drawing on recent theories of interactive governance and political leadership, Eva Sørensen develops a concept of interactive political leadership that aims to capture what political leadership looks like in a society of active, anti-authoritarian, and politically competent citizens. The key message is that although interactive political leadership is no panacea, it is a step forward in developing a mature perception of what political leadership means in a democratic society with a strong participatory political culture. Hence, interactive political leadership stands out as a promising way of promoting the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic governance by establishing a bridge between representative democracy and emergent forms of political participation, promoting political learning and accountability, strengthening the political entrepreneurship of elected politicians, and mobilizing relevant resources in society. The book develops twenty propositions that sets the agenda for a new and much-needed field of empirical research into political leadership in the age of governance.
Leadership in the Age of Governance
Authors: Sørensen Eva
Published: February 2020

Building on an extensive literature on interactive governance, Chapter 2 explains what it entails to be in the age of governance and scrutinizes the implications for the performance of public leadership. A key message is that public leadership increasingly takes on the form of metagovernance, i.e. the governance of governance. As meta-governors, public leaders govern self-regulating actors through different hands-off and hands-on regulation methods. Forty years of government reforms have gradually restructured the public sector to support the performance of metagovernance, and inspiration came from different strands of neo-institutionalism. Metagovernance research has mainly focused on managerial metagovernance, however, while paying scant attention to political metagovernance and the role of politicians as leaders of interactive governance processes. Recent strands of political leadership theory provide important insights for developing a notion of political metagovernance and get to grips with the role of politicians in the age of governance.
Enhancing Policy Implementation through Interactive Political Leadership
Authors: Sørensen Eva
Published: February 2020

The legitimacy of representative democracy hinges on its ability to implement the policies that politicians make. Citizens may experience that their interests and viewpoints are taken into account in the political process, that the political process is fair, and that policies made are relevant and convincing responses to the problems they experience and aspirations they have. If policy implementation fails, it is likely to have a negative effect on citizens’ assessments of the efficiency and effectiveness of the political system, its executive institutions, and the competence and skill of incumbent political authorities. It reduces the political system’s outcome legitimacy. New theories of co-production and co-creation and research into how public and private actors work together to promote public value suggest that successful implementation of policy outcomes is more likely when relevant and affected societal actors are involved. This involving approach to getting things done leads to the formulation of a concept of socio-political implementation referring to co-created policy-implementation. Most of the socio-political implementation research tends to overlook the important role of politics and political leadership for successful co-creation of policy implementation. Chapter 7 argues that politicians have a crucial role to play as interactive political leaders of co-created policy implementation.
Conclusion
Authors: Sørensen Eva
Published: February 2020

Chapter 11 aggregates the conceptual developments and theoretical argument and research findings presented in the previous chapters into a theoretical framework for studying the political leadership of elected politicians in the age of governance. The framework suggests that interactive political leadership holds the potential to promote robust political authorization in the age of governance through a promotion of interactive democracy, political learning accountability, interactive political entrepreneurship, and socio-political implementation. Conditioning factors are multi-level governance, an increased mediatization of political communication and access to interactive political platforms and arenas. Moreover, the chapter provides twenty propositions regarding the prospects for, and dilemmas and challenges related to the performance of interactive political leadership that can guide and inspire future research. Finally, the chapter proposes an agenda for future research and highlights the need for empirical studies on the scope for interactive political leadership in different contexts, discourse analyses of current understandings of political leadership and followership, process studies of the interplay between politicians and citizens, and studies of the impact of institutional design on political leadership styles.
Which Government’s Policy Style is More Conducive to Prevention?
Authors: Cairney Paul , St Denny Emily
Published: February 2020

We have demonstrated that many governments face the same ‘prevention puzzle’, caused partly by universal drivers associated with multi-centric policymaking. Further, they face contradictory pressures to share power for pragmatic reasons or centralize power to seem in control. However, what if policymakers in different political systems try to solve these dilemmas in fundamentally different ways? For example, are some systems more conducive to long-term planning and more likely to facilitate central governments trying to ‘let go’ and encourage localism? This question is often central to comparative political studies involving the UK. The UK’s Westminster model often represents the archetype of a ‘majoritarian’ democracy with a top-down policymaking style and adversarial political culture. Lijphart contrasts it with ‘consensus’ democracy characterized by coalition-building between parties and political culture built on ‘inclusiveness, bargaining and compromise’. In theory, this distinction could guide our analysis of UK and Scottish preventive policymaking, since some ‘architects of devolution’ envisaged ‘new Scottish politics’ as the antidote to ‘old Westminster’, to produce a consensus democracy with greater emphasis on pragmatic policymaking. However, their reputations are inaccurate caricatures that provide a misleading way to compare UK and Scottish prevention policy.
Prevention Policy and Public Health
Authors: Cairney Paul , St Denny Emily
Published: February 2020

Health policy is the traditional home of prevention policies. Public health is at the heart of policies designed to improve population health, and perhaps reduce health inequalities, often through changes in behaviour at an early age. Public health policy tends to be a hub for advocates of EBPM. In theory, healthcare and public health are symbiotic, particularly if early public health interventions reduce demand for acute healthcare. However, in practice, public health is an exemplar of the wide gap between expectations for ‘evidence-based’ prevention policy and actual outcomes. To demonstrate, first, we apply our theoretical approach, outlined in Chapters 1 to 3, to present a broad examination of health policy and the role of prevention within it, considering what a window of opportunity for prevention policy within a complex system means in relation to health and public health policy. Second, we show that the UK and Scottish governments have described different policy styles, but faced and addressed the ambiguity and complexity of preventive health policy in similar ways. Third, our comparison of broad prevention versus specific tobacco policies shows why substantive policy change is more apparent in the latter: there is a clearer definition of the policy problem, a more supportive environment for meaningful policy change, and more windows of opportunity for specific policy changes. These three conditions are not yet fulfilled in the broader prevention agenda.
Early Intervention for ‘Troubled Families’
Authors: Cairney Paul , St Denny Emily
Published: February 2020

Early intervention in the lives of families and children is a central part of the prevention agenda. However, there is little consensus on the ways in which to do it, based on the framing of target populations, timing of intervention, extent of state involvement in family life, and evidence for the success of each intervention. To frame this analysis we ask: (1) Was there a distinctive ‘window of opportunity’ for the introduction of the troubled families programme in the UK? (2) How does each government socially construct target populations, and what is the effect on policy design? (3) To what extent has each government relied on local authorities and partnerships to deliver its national agenda, and what outcomes or practices have ‘emerged’ from local activity? To help answer these questions, we consider the meaning of ‘families policy’ to help understand who has responsibility for it, trace three main elements of their policy histories, and gauge the extent to which UK policy already represented divergence from the past and from Scottish policy.
Minimal Substantivity
Authors: Belleri Delia
Published: February 2020

This chapter defends a notion of “minimal substantivity” for ontological disputes, focusing on persistence and composition as case-studies. Deflationists argue that these disputes are defective: they are merely verbal, or epistemically underdetermined. Anti-Deflationists emphasize the substantivity of these controversies, either in Quinean terms, or in terms of fundamentality. This chapter aims at striking a mid-way between these approaches, thus outlining a Minimal Anti-Deflationism. First, it is shown that even if these ontological disputes are merely verbal, they can be recast as non-verbal metalinguistic disputes. These exchanges have in turn an ontological substantivity if we understand them as disputes about which ontological commitments we should undertake. This substantivity is however minimal, because it need not be articulated either naturalistically or in terms of fundamentality. In closing, an illustration is provided of the fruitfulness of the minimal substantivity notion for cases of conceptual engineering.
Strategic Conceptual Engineering for Epistemic and Social Aims
Authors: Brigandt Ingo , Rosario Esther
Published: February 2020

This chapter advocates strategic conceptual engineering, that is, the employment of a (possibly novel) concept for specific epistemic or social aims, concomitant with the openness to use a different concept for other contexts. We illustrate this approach by sketching three distinct concepts of gender and arguing that all of them are needed, as they answer to different social aims. The first concept serves the aim of identifying and explaining gender-based discrimination. It is similar to Haslanger’s account, except that rather than offering a definition of ‘woman’ we focus on ‘gender’ as one among several axes of discrimination. The second concept of gender is to assign legal rights and social recognitions, and is to be trans-inclusive. We argue that this cannot be achieved by previously suggested concepts (including Jenkins’s) that include substantial gender-related psychological features or awareness of social expectations. The third concept of gender serves the aim of personal empowerment through gender identity. This chapter points to contexts where a concept’s role in explanation and moral reasoning can be more important than determining the extensions of concepts.
Preliminary Scouting Reports from the Outer Limits of Conceptual Engineering
Authors: Dever Josh
Published: February 2020

If we distinguish between the conceptual engineering task of determining what concepts can be built and the conceptual ethics task of determining what concepts ought to be used once built, we make clear the possibility of a conceptual maximalist position that avoids conceptual ethics by holding that the norms of theorizing require a big theory including all truths expressible using any concepts. But the conceptual maximalist then assumes the burden of saying what the range of possible concepts (equivalently, possible languages) is. Despite the attractions of conceptual maximalism, we lack even the beginnings of an answer to the question of what concepts there could be.
Descriptive vs. Ameliorative Projects
Authors: León E. Díaz
Published: February 2020

Feminist philosophers have famously argued that contextual factors play a role in the justification and assessment of scientific theories. A similar question might arise regarding inquiries in metaphysics. Contemporary metaphysicians often assume that contextual factors do not belong in metaphysics. The main aim of this chapter is to argue that normative considerations such as moral and political considerations are relevant in metaphysics. In particular, this chapter explores the nature of descriptive projects seeking to reveal the operative concept associated with a term (as opposed to ameliorative projects seeking to reveal the target concept that we should associate with the term), and argues that moral and political considerations are relevant not only with respect to ameliorative projects but also with respect to descriptive projects.
Going On, Not in the Same Way
Authors: Haslanger Sally
Published: February 2020

This chapter considers, within an externalist semantics, several ways we might understand the project of improving our concepts to promote greater justice. The tools that culture provides us with—such as language, concepts, and inferential patterns—provide frames for coordination and shape our interaction. There are multiple ways these tools can fail us, for example by the limited structure of options they make intelligible. However, we can sometimes reconfigure the resources so that our practical orientations are more responsive to what is good and coordinate in ways that are just. Such reconfiguration often happens in law; it also occurs in social movements, counter-publics, subaltern communities, and in fascist propaganda. Contestation over meaning is not “mere semantics” for—together with political and material change—it can shape our agency and our lives together.
Philosophy as the Study of Defective Concepts
Authors: Scharp Kevin
Published: February 2020

From familiar concepts like tall and table to exotic ones like gravity and genocide, they guide our lives and are the basis for how we represent the world. However, there is good reason to think that many of our most cherished concepts, like truth, freedom, knowledge, and rationality, are defective in the sense that the rules for using them are inconsistent. This defect leads those who possess these concepts into paradoxes and absurdities. Indeed, I argue that many of the central problems of contemporary philosophy should be thought of as having their source in philosophical concepts that are defective in this way. If that is right, then we should take a more active role in crafting and sculpting our conceptual repertoire. We need to explore various ways of replacing these defective concepts with ones that will still do the work we need them to do without leading us into contradictions.
Linguistic Intervention and Transformative Communicative Disruptions
Authors: Sterken Rachel Katharine
Published: February 2020

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn’t use slurs; we should use ‘rape’ to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with ‘rape’), or adding brand new word-meaning pairs (as with ‘sexual harassment’). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that’s a feature, not a bug, of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language.
The Tragedy of Aimé Césaire
Authors: Lecznar Adam
Published: February 2020

This chapter examines the forms of classicism that proliferate in the writings of the Martinican poet-politician Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), focusing in particular on his 1963 drama The Tragedy of King Christopher. The classical form of tragedy, mediated through Nietzsche, provides Césaire with a way of reconsidering the reverberations of the Haitian revolution throughout the black Atlantic as a foundational event of black identity. Césaire uses tragedy to dramatize the story of Henri Christophe, the creator of a monarchy in the northern part of Haiti in the early nineteenth century, as a way of instructing his audience on the urgent issue of black political organization in the mid-twentieth century.
Can Evolution Inform Insights into Normal and Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes and Ultimately Improve Maternal and Fetal Care?
Authors: Aungst Heide , Rossi Robert , Brockway Heather , Mesiano Sam , Muglia Louis
Published: February 2020

Human survival, like all mammals’, is dependent upon successful pregnancy, the characteristics of which have been subjected to strong evolutionary pressures. This selection process for optimizing reproductive outcomes is unique in that two individuals are affected at the same time, the mother and fetus, and their respective interests may be either congruent or divergent. In this chapter, we provide an overview for considering evolutionary influences on pregnancy, general physiology of human pregnancy, and interactions of the mother and fetus that can either shape a healthy pregnancy or result in complications of pregnancy. Moreover, in considering research into mechanisms of pregnancy maintenance and parturition, we discuss the challenges and opportunities of differing reproductive strategies between species, altering selection in distinct ways, and making pregnancy in women unique amongst mammals.
Association and cognitive processing
Authors: Schmid Hans-Jörg
Published: February 2020

The chapter discusses the cognitive activities which are performed in usage events and entrenched, if repeated. The key cognitive activity is association in the associative network, with four types of associations (symbolic, paradigmatic, syntagmatic, paradigmatic) being activated in predictive and probabilistic lexical and syntactic processing. Processing and representation take place in the form of entrenched patterns of associations. Language processing is explained in terms of the activation of associations. This activation is probabilistic and follows the principle of predictive coding. Lexical-semantic processing is understood in terms of dynamic and transient multidimensional activation patterns in the associative network targeting attractors in the network. A highly dynamic and flexible associative model of syntactic processing is proposed. It is first developed with reference to two examples and then described in general form. The model is very important for the understanding of entrenchment to be discussed in Part III.
Summary of Part II
Authors: Schmid Hans-Jörg
Published: February 2020

This short chapter provides a summary of Part II of the book. It highlights the multidimensional contingency of conventionalized utterance types and suggests a pseudo-technical formula for describing how the conventionality of utterance types is a function of onomasiological, semasiological, and syntagmatic conformity within a community depending on cotext and context. In addition, the chapter recapitulates how the conventionalization processes of usualization and diffusion contribute to establishing, sustaining, and adapting conventionalized utterance types. The diverse forms of interaction between the two processes control and modulate to what extent different parts of the linguistic system remain quite uniform and stable or are subject to linguistic variation and change.