Special relationships: Anglo-American affinities and antagonisms 1854-1936

This collection of essays by leading scholars of American literature and culture has emerged out of recent debates on the historical, geographical, symbolic, and cultural significance of the Atlantic, as well as new work in the area of Transatlantic Studies. In a series of fascinating essays the authors have produced diverse and innovative interventions in the field of Anglo-American literary relations. The authors discussed range from Gertrude Stein to Alfred North Whitehead, Charlotte Perkins Gilman to Sarah Grand, Henry James to George Eliot, Elizabeth Stoddard to Charlotte Bronte, Mark Twain to Walter Scott through to Djuna Barnes and Evelyn Waugh. Subjects discussed include Scottish-American literary relations, the Atlanticist dimension of Spiritualism, American interventions in the debate about Highland clearances, American slavery and British pastoralism

Policy to preparedness: flood policy and community engagement

The findings of the report show that recent flood-related policies are beneficially interconnected at regional, Scottish and UK levels. The egalitarian approach evident within them is supportive of climate and social justice. However, while egalitarian policy approaches are the ideal when pursuing climate and social justice, such policies face a complex test when they are implemented amongst existing inequalities in society. The research team found distribution of physical flood risk is not fair nor equal, nor are the social circumstances of many who live on low incomes with limited resources. Recognition of the diversity of circumstances, viewpoints and vulnerabilities in Scotland is essential to build place-based sustainable community flood resilience

Talking about Black Lives Matter and #MeToo

In her remarks to the 1971 National Women's Political Caucus, civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer described the quest for individual freedom as coextensive with the pursuit of liberation for all people.2 Almost fifty years later, this belief undergirds the work of the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements. Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tome, three self-described "radical Black organizers,"3 founded Black Lives Matter in response to the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year old, shot and killed by a selfappointed neighborhood "watch" coordinator in a gated community. The shooter claimed that Martin looked suspicious and that he fired the gun in self-defense against Martin.4 People took to the streets in response to the deaths of Martin and then others, as the general public could no longer ignore the number of Black men and boys killed by police each year-men and boys including Eric Garner (Staten Island, New York, 2014), Michael Brown (Ferguson, Missouri, 2014), Tamir Rice (Cleveland, Ohio, 2014), Walter Scott (North Charleston, South Carolina, 2015), Freddie Gray (Baltimore, Maryland, 2015), Laquan McDonald (Chicago, Illinois, 2015), Philando Castille (Falcon Heights, Minnesota, 2016), Terence Crutcher (Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2016), Antwon Rose II (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 2018), and O'Shae Terry (Arlington, Texas, 2018).5 Activists have established chapters of the Black Lives Matter organization in other cities throughout the United States.6 #BlackLivesMatter is a frequent hashtag on social media. Black Lives Matter shines the light on the pattern of killings.7 It is a racial justice movement with a goal to "transform the state."

Talking about Black Lives Matter and #MeToo

This essay explores the apparent differences and similarities between the Black Lives Matter and the #MeToo movements. In April 2019, the Wisconsin Journal of Gender, Law and Society hosted a symposium entitled “Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Black Lives Matter and the Role of Intersectional Legal Analysis in the Twenty-First Century.” That program facilitated examination of the historical antecedents, cultural contexts, methods, and goals of these linked equality movements. Conversations continued among the symposium participants long after the end of the official program. In this essay, the symposium’s speakers memorialize their robust conversations and also dive more deeply into the phenomena, implications, and future of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. This essay organizes around internal and external spatial metaphors and makes five schematic moves. First, internal considerations ground comparisons of the definitions, goals, and ideas of success employed by or applied to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo. Second, external concerns inspire questions about whether both movements may be better understood through the lens of intersectionality, and relatedly, what challenges these movements pose for an intersectional analysis. Third, a meta-internal framework invites inquiry into how the movements shape the daily work of scholars, teachers, lawyers, and community activists. Fourth, a dialectical external-internal frame drives questions about the movements’ effects on law and popular culture, and the reciprocal effects between those external influences and the movements themselves. Returning to an external, even forward-looking, approach, we ask what the next steps are for both movements. This five-part taxonomy frames the inquiry into where the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements are located individually, but also where they are co-located, and, perhaps most importantly, where they are going

Protocol for a realist review of workplace learning in postgraduate medical education and training

Postgraduate medical education and training (PGMET) is a complex social process which happens predominantly during the delivery of patient care. The clinical learning environment (CLE), the context for PGMET, shapes the development of the doctors who learn and work within it, ultimately impacting the quality and safety of patient care. Clinical workplaces are complex, dynamic systems in which learning emerges from non-linear interactions within a network of related factors and activities. Those tasked with the design and delivery of postgraduate medical education and training need to understand the relationship between the processes of medical workplace learning and these contextual elements in order to optimise conditions for learning. We propose to conduct a realist synthesis of the literature to address the overarching questions; how, why and in what circumstances do doctors learn in clinical environments? This review is part of a funded projected with the overall aim of producing guidelines and recommendations for the design of high quality clinical learning environments for postgraduate medical education and training

Social and clinical determinants of preferences and their achievement at the end of life: Prospective cohort study of older adults receiving palliative care in three countries

© 2017 The Author(s). Background: Achieving choice is proposed as a quality marker. But little is known about what influences preferences especially among older adults. We aimed to determine and compare, across three countries, factors associated with preferences for place of death and treatment, and actual site of death. Methods: We recruited adults aged ≥65-years from hospital-based multiprofessional palliative care services in London, Dublin, New York, and followed them for >17 months. All services offered consultation on hospital wards, support for existing clinical teams, outpatient services and received funding from their National Health Service and/or relevant Insurance reimbursements. The New York service additionally had 10 inpatient beds. All worked with and referred patients to local hospices. Face-to-face interviews recorded most and least preferred place of death, treatment goal priorities, demographic and clinical information using validated questionnaires. Multivariable and multilevel analyses assessed associated factors. Results: One hundred and thirty eight older adults (64 London, 59 Dublin, 15 New York) were recruited, 110 died during follow-up. Home was the most preferred place of death (77/138, 56%) followed by inpatient palliative care/hospice units (22%). Hospital was least preferred (35/138, 25%), followed by nursing home (20%) and home (16%); hospice/palliative care unit was rarely least preferred (4%). Most respondents prioritised improving quality of life, either alone (54%), or equal with life extension (39%); few (3%) chose only life extension. There were no significant differences between countries. Main associates with home preference were: cancer diagnosis (OR 3.72, 95% CI 1.40-9.90) and living with someone (OR 2.19, 1.33-3.62). Adults with non-cancer diagnoses were more likely to prefer palliative care units (OR 2.39, 1.14-5.03). Conversely, functional independence (OR 1.05, 1.04-1.06) and valuing quality of life (OR 3.11, 2.89-3.36) were associated with dying at home. There was a mismatch between preferences and achievements - of 85 people who preferred home or a palliative care unit, 19 (25%) achieved their first preference. Conclusion: Although home is the most common first preference, it is polarising and for 16% it is the least preferred. Inpatient palliative care unit emerges as the second most preferred place, is rarely least preferred, and yet was often not achieved for those who wanted to die there. Factors affecting stated preferences and met preferences differ. Available services, notably community support and palliative care units, require expansion. Contrasting actual place of death with capacity for meeting patient and family needs may be a better quality indicator than simply 'achieved preferences'

Individual common variants exert weak effects on the risk for autism spectrum disorders.

While it is apparent that rare variation can play an important role in the genetic architecture of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), the contribution of common variation to the risk of developing ASD is less clear. To produce a more comprehensive picture, we report Stage 2 of the Autism Genome Project genome-wide association study, adding 1301 ASD families and bringing the total to 2705 families analysed (Stages 1 and 2). In addition to evaluating the association of individual single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), we also sought evidence that common variants, en masse, might affect the risk. Despite genotyping over a million SNPs covering the genome, no single SNP shows significant association with ASD or selected phenotypes at a genome-wide level. The SNP that achieves the smallest P-value from secondary analyses is rs1718101. It falls in CNTNAP2, a gene previously implicated in susceptibility for ASD. This SNP also shows modest association with age of word/phrase acquisition in ASD subjects, of interest because features of language development are also associated with other variation in CNTNAP2. In contrast, allele scores derived from the transmission of common alleles to Stage 1 cases significantly predict case status in the independent Stage 2 sample. Despite being significant, the variance explained by these allele scores was small (Vm< 1%). Based on results from individual SNPs and their en masse effect on risk, as inferred from the allele score results, it is reasonable to conclude that common variants affect the risk for ASD but their individual effects are modest