William Nelson

Bio: William Nelson is an academic researcher from University of Texas at Austin. The author has contributed to research in topics: Patient advocacy & Enlightenment. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 3 publications receiving 113 citations.

Making men: Enlightenment ideas of racial engineering

Abstract: This essay suggests a colonial and Enlightenment genealogy for racial ideas more commonly associated with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nelson exposes unfulfilled pseudo-eugenic plans, focused on the French Caribbean colony of Saint-Domingue, in which racial engineering through controlled "breeding" was seen as a solution to challenges to stability after the Seven Years' War.

Engaging patients as partners in a multicentre trial of spinal versus general anaesthesia for older adults.

Abstract: Summary Engaging patients—defined broadly as individuals with lived experience of a given condition, family members, caregivers, and the organisations that represent them—as partners in research is a priority for policymakers, funders, and the public. Nonetheless, formal efforts to engage patients are absent from most studies, and models to support meaningful patient engagement in clinical anaesthesia research have not been previously described. Here, we review our experience in developing and implementing a multifaceted patient engagement strategy within the Regional Versus General Anesthesia for Promoting Independence After Hip Fracture (REGAIN) surgery trial, an ongoing randomised trial comparing spinal vs general anaesthesia for hip fracture surgery in 1600 older adults across 45 hospitals in the USA and Canada. This strategy engaged patients and their representatives at both the level of overall trial oversight and at the level of individual recruiting sites. Activities spanned a continuum ranging from events designed to elicit patients' input on key decisions to longitudinal collaborations that empowered patients to actively participate in decision-making related to trial design and management. Engagement activities were highly acceptable to participants and led to concrete changes in the design and conduct of the REGAIN trial. The REGAIN experience offers a model for future efforts to engage patients as partners in clinical anaesthesia research, and highlights potential opportunities for investigators to increase the relevance of anaesthesia studies by incorporating patient voices and perspectives into the research process.

Spoken Grammar: Where Are We and Where Are We Going?

Abstract: This article synthesises progress made in the description of spoken (especially conversational) grammar over the 20 years since the authors published a paper in this journal arguing for a re-thinking of grammatical description and pedagogy based on spoken corpus evidence. We begin with a glance back at the 16th century and the teaching of Latin grammar in England, with its emphasis on speaking the target language. Later grammars were dominated by written standards, a situation that persisted till the 20th century, when recording technology and spoken corpora enabled new insights into the grammar of everyday speaking. We highlight those insights which especially challenge grammars derived only or mainly from written sources. We evidence the view that conversational grammar is non-sentence-based, co-constructed and highly interactive, and that it poses questions concerning metalanguage. We briefly review debates concerning spoken grammar and ELT/ESL pedagogy. We then consider 21st-century Internet technologies and e-communication, and implications for the spoken/written grammar distinction, arguing that description and pedagogy may need to undergo further re-thinking in light of the multi-modality which characterises e-language.

The Shaping of French National Identity: Narrating the Nation's Past, 1715–1830

Abstract: The Shaping of French National Identity casts new light on the intellectual origins of the dominant and 'official' French nineteenth-century national narrative. Focussing on the historical debates taking place throughout the eighteenth century and during the Restoration, Matthew D'Auria evokes a time when the nation's origins were being questioned and discussed and when they acquired the meaning later enshrined in the official rhetoric of the Third Republic. He examines how French writers and scholars reshaped the myths, symbols, and memories of pre-modern communities. Engaging with the myth of 'our ancestors the Gauls' and its ideological triumph over the competing myth of 'our ancestors the Franks', this study explores the ways in which the struggle developed, and the values that the two discourses enshrined, the collective actors they portrayed, and the memories they evoked. D'Auria draws attention to the continuity between ethnic discourses and national narratives and to the competition between various groups in their claims to represent the nation and to define their past as the 'true' history of France.