Chapter 7 considers the boundary for the end of girlhood under international law. It applies Welby’s Meaning Triad to discuss the sense, meaning and significance of the current definition of child in the CRC. It argues that this definition is problematic on several grounds: absence of a minimum age for the end of girlhood, discrepancy between the end of girlhood and emancipation, possibility of unequal treatment on the grounds of gender, national domicile, and between girls under domestic law. It examines positive features of the CRC and the benefit for girls to be covered until eighteen years. It also analyzes ‘childist’ provisions of the CRC and empowering provisions of other treaties, and whether girls should reach majority before eighteen years. It conducts case studies of child justice and child marriage. Finally, it employs semioethics to identify amendments to the definition of child in the CRC that would tackle its shortcomings.

Chapter 2 provides a history of the recognition of the girl child in the international legal framework, from the universalist to the qualified universalist approach, and finally to the girl child as a distinct rights holder under international law. Chapter 2 thereafter conducts an examination of the definition of girl child in the English language. It critically studies the terminology presently used to define her and explores the etymology of the expression ‘girl’ and its semiotics of inferiority and subordination throughout history. The chapter analyzes the two vectors of identity of the girl child: femalehood and childhood. It examines the conceptions of girlhood and its 1) dimensions, 2) boundaries and 3) divisions. It discusses age-based and competence-based boundaries, and parameters for the end of girlhood in the English language and in the law, including definitions concerning puberty, youth and majority. It also suggests divisions within girlhood, namely young girls and adolescent girls.

This chapter uncovers the unintended trajectory of Taiwanese women’s freedom among younger adopted daughters in the Japanese colonial courts. Family-centric, gender-based physical unfreedom continued to be one of the salient administrative and legal problems in Taiwan from the precolonial period to the late 1910s. Male household heads were not ready to follow the judicial construction of women’s freedom of movement during the early to mid-1920s. However, Japanese judges involved with female litigants shifted their focus to women’s freedom of choice – defined by intent and contractual freedom among adopted daughters – as a new boundary delineating their relationships with households in civil and criminal cases in the late 1920s. Women’s choice continued to be a central point of dispute when adopted daughters became targets of their parents and strangers. These daughters’ ambiguous capacity regarding their age, class background, and sexual integrity was misrepresented to legitimize their adverse labor and life conditions, including sex work. Yet, it was within the flexible contours of choice that the courts protected women’s agency, which, in turn, became a constitutive part of colonial history.

In this chapter we explore a manually annotated subset of data from the corpora studied in this book, which have been analysed to show the presence of narratives as understood by researchers studying this concept. In this narrative study we return to an exploration of differences arising from L1 and cultural background and, inter alia, conclude that cultural background may have an important role to play in the frequency and nature of narrative. In drawing such conclusions, we refer, where appropriate, to existing research on SLA and narrative. Overall, the study suggests that, while there are similarities between L1 and L2 narrative use, there are also differences, some attributable to the learner, others to the task/context in which the data was gathered.

Human rights are granted to all humans based on their humanity. The justification for human rights is that every individual is born free and equal in possession of a rational mind. The CRC does not define the begining of childhood, only its end at the age of 18. The monist construction of the child-rights identity is unique because, depending on national legal regulations around abortion, it is possible to apply it from the moment of conception and does not require being live-born.

Making the child-rights identity detached from its social context and the possibility of self-identification serves to protect the child from traditional and social harmful practices directed toward children. At the same time, the monist identity of the child becomes placed out of reach of democratic deliberations and self-determination. The intersectionality of race and gender becomes two socially constructed concepts that cannot be addressed within the child-rights identity, which both serves to protect the child from discrimination but also risks making child rights detached from addressing crucial structural inequalities based on race and gender.

This introduction to the Cambridge Companion to the Electric Guitar offers a concise synopsis of the dominant narrative surrounding the instrument, and establishes the ways in which the current collection seeks to expand the existing framework for considering the electric guitar’s history and cultural impact. It also discusses the provisional development of “guitar studies” as an academic field, highlighting trends in conferences, journalistic and special interest publications, and discussions surrounding music technology, the electric guitar industry, and socio-demographic issues such as gender, race, and age. While electric guitar scholarship has made significant progress, it has not fully established itself as a distinct field. Currently, there is no dedicated journal or professional organization for researchers in this area. “Guitar studies” may not yet have come to fruition, but its foundation is being laid, to which this Cambridge Companion intends to contribute.

Britain is not a good place to be poor. That has become even more true over the last fourteen years. Our justification for that statement is that, in Britain, the health of the poorest people, always lower than that of the average person, declined since 2010. Regional inequalities in health also increased with the ‘Red Wall’ north falling further behind. There has also been stagnation in the UK’s average life expectancy – and we have dropped down the international rankings. Please let the implications sink in: the health of the poorest people and places got worse; life expectancy went down; living with illness went up; and thousands of families lost loved ones before their time. It is an unprecedented calamity.

Because people have many identities, or multiple identities, social context and cues are important in determining when a social identity or group membership drives behaviour. Traumatic reminders, or triggers, can make group memberships salient. These reminders can take the form of discrete events or even wider events where political or historical context is seen to be relevant. Trauma has the capacity to reveal differences between us, or between us and ‘them’. A long tradition of research in social psychology documents the role of a sense of ingroup and outgroup, ‘us’ and ‘them’, that underlies tensions and hostilities between groups. In contexts where the situation is already oppositional or polarised, these tensions can quickly give rise to anger and even open hostilities. This can lead to a downward spiral of events where the anger and distress associated with traumatic circumstances give rise to social and political action.

Percy Shelley has been a young man’s poet. Ever since Matthew Arnold dubbed his predecessor a “beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” poets and critics would pit Shelley’s youthful radicalism against their own grown-up poetics and politics. T. S. Eliot would, for example, rhapsodize about his teenage years misspent idolizing the Romantic poet just to articulate his newfound modernism. Two hundred years later, we might amend the cliché to say that Percy Shelley is a young woman’s poet. His is the social media–savvy voice of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, dreaming of a Green New Deal and the systematic dismantling of institutional inequities; Arnold’s the establishment voice of Nancy Pelosi, chastising the beat of ineffectual wings. Because of this generational reading of Shelley, his last unfinished poem, The Triumph of Life, frequently sounds like a pessimistic turn from Promethean idealism toward Byronic cynicism, like youthful radicalism disappointed by unfulfilled promises. This chapter argues instead that the poem’s embodied contingencies of age, debility, and disability shape rather than frustrate Shelley’s developing idealism.