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.

This is a chapter in which Chinese politeness is compared with politeness in Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese. With their respective morphological systems of honorification, Japanese and Korean languages are structurally different from Chinese, an isolating language that has hardly any inflectional morphology. These linguistic differences, however, do not prevent the three linguacultures to demonstrate a remarkable degree of similarity in terms of politeness at a deeper level of analysis. The three linguacultures, for instance, seem to be similarly hierarchical in social structure, although they differ in the relative weight a particular factor on a hierarchy has in a given context. The architectural features of language, Chen argues, are not as determinant in politeness as scholars have believed. A culture value such as self-denigration, which often presents itself in terms of politeness, is expressed regardless of how the language is structured linguistically. Vietnamese, on the other hand, is typologically close to Chinese, its culture shares much with Chinese culture, but it was under the French rule for several decades (1985-1954). And yet, B&L-E is shown to be capable of capturing the similarities and differences between it and Chinese in terms of politeness.

If treatments or vaccines for COVID-19 are scarce, should patients pre-existing disabilities be relevant to allocating those interventions? In allocating scarce life-sustaining treatments, some crisis standards of care have explicitly deprioritized or even categorically excluded individuals with underlying conditions that are understood to limit probability of survival, life expectancy or the quality of life. Others have used scoring systems that may work to the disadvantage of people with certain disabilities. All of these systems have faced opposition from disability rights advocates. But advocates have not opposed proposals to prioritize individuals with pre-existing disabilities for receipt of a vaccine. This chapter offers a dialogue on the legal and ethical questions presented by the impact of allocation policies on individuals with disabilities. One of the authors has served as counsel to advocacy organizations that have challenged disability-based crisis standards of care; the other author has defended evidence-based use of disability in allocating scarce life-sustaining treatments.

Chapter 4 moves between the era of classic capitalism (up to the Great Crash), and the present era of neoliberal capitalism. The first was somewhat reined in by the New Deal and the second is still generating the One Percent condition of enormous inequalities. Symptomatic of economic derangement during neoliberalism is the growing impact of financial institutions, which produce little but profit greatly.

The present chapter set out to complement the quantitative analyses in Chapter 3 with more qualitative analyses of L2 learners’ beliefs and assessment of advancedness. We analyzed the different metalinguistic descriptors they produced to describe their beliefs and other speakers’ actual use of language, its content, manner, and the L2 speaker’s identity. We found that our L2 learners were only partially explicitly aware of the language, the content, and the manner exhibited by our L2 speakers, but that they were implicitly sensitive to categorically different levels of intercultural competence among different L2 speakers. We concluded that our L2 listeners could only partially imagine L2 advancedness, and we hypothesized that the lack of a full understanding of advancedness, operationalized as a lack of language awareness, could inhibit their ability to develop an L2 identity. Consequently, we call for future research to examine how institutional intervention, through curricular design or student advising, may help to make students more explicitly aware of the multifaceted nature of advancedness, as well its empowering effect on their identity and agency as an L2 speaker.