Connectivity – Contributions from the Network #11 – Planning our article

Over the last three weeks I’ve posted up some prompts to start a conversation around connectivity – one of the many ideas that might help us think practically about how physiotherapy might respond to the changes taking place in health care.

Over that time I’ve had lots of responses from members of the group, and I’ve posted these on the blog.

It’s time now to start thinking about a paper that will communicate some of these ideas to the broader physiotherapy community.  I said we would have written within three months and with a bit of collective effort we’ll do this easily.

First we need to define the structure of the article, and then allocate people to draft sections.  I said all along, that people who made a substantial contribution to the paper would be co-authors…it’s not too late to through your hat into the ring.

My suggestion would be to mirror something like the structure of the paper Barbara Gibson and I wrote on ‘The body and physiotherapy.’  This seemed to work reasonably well as a way to communicate ideas.  We have to assume that papers like this are read by people who actively make use of the ideas promoted in the paper, and this is most likely to be graduate students, academics and researchers who in turn translate these ideas into local practice.  So our emphasis should be on translating the complexities of connectivity to best communicate the principles to people who can then develop their own variations.  We shouldn’t try to be too prescriptive or pragmatic about what people should think, or how people should use the concepts talked about in the paper.

So the article might be laid out as follows:

Introduction/background (500 words)

• Basic definition of connectivity
• Brief statement of it’s rising significance
• Some of the tensions surrounding physiotherapy that make it relevant
• Briefly what it might mean to physiotherapy
• Justification for exploring it in more depth

Philosophical/theoretical background (2500 words)

• Explain and delimit connectivity as a concept – what it is, and what it’s not
• Brief overview of similar concepts (i.e. intersubjectivity, symbolic interactionism)
• Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualisation of connectivity

Application of theory (2500 words)

• How connectivity might change how we view the world
• How it might change how we view health care
• …and then physiotherapy

Discussion (500 words)

• Why is it new?
• Why is it so relevant now for us?
• What possibilities does it hold?
• What are its limitations?
• Where to from here?

Conclusion (300 words)

Total length – 6300 words (within recommended limits for Physiotherapy Theory and Practice).

What do you think?  Would you want the paper to work any differently?  Should it have a different structure or purpose?  Send me your thoughts and I’ll collate these for a subsequent post.