In April, a new journal called Applied Mobilities was launched by Taylor and Francis. Given physiotherapy’s interest in anything to do with mobility, you might be mistaken for believing that this was a new journal for us. But it isn’t.
Well it could be, but physiotherapy is currently only interested in quite specific kinds of mobility – the kind involving the biomechanical body – and isn’t particularly interested in material semiotics or the day-to-day movements of Chinese migrant women in Sydney.
So the journal joins the ranks of other journals like Body and Society, Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences and Medical Humanities as journals that physiotherapists probably ought to publish more in, but don’t.
For a long time, physiotherapy has only had one journal that deals specifically with the ideas and philosophies that underpin our work – Physiotherapy Theory and Practice – but this is now groaning under the weight of submissions from researchers and writers eager to explore and apply ideas from critical theory, disability studies, economics, feminism, philosophy, politics and sociology.
So is it time for a new critical physiotherapy journal?
There would be a lot to consider if we were going to launch a new journal: how would it be underwritten; where would it be housed; who would edit, review and, more importantly, write for the journal; would it be digital or traditional, or both; what would its editorial policy be? Most importantly, who would read it?
Over the last two years, we’ve seen an amazing amount of interest in the CPN, and people have asked on a number of occasions if we have plans for a journal. We’ve always been a bit overwhelmed by the scale of the project to really consider it. But perhaps now might be a good time to give it some more thought.
It would be very interesting to hear your views.
I think its a great idea – and I would be happy to help get this started.
I’d love to see this happen, not only because it would provide a much needed counterbalance to the overwhelming number of journals that look at physiotherapy practice from a purely technical rationalist point of view, but also because it would be an opportunity to explore different methods of sharing research.
It’s not often that we get to start over and do things differently. What about something like Hybrid Pedagogy (http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/) that is “a community, a conversation, a collaboration, a school, and a journal.” How wonderful that an online journal could be more than a platform for publishing papers. What if the CPN had a journal component to the network, housed on the same platform?
We could consider using PressBooks (https://wordpress.org/plugins/pressbooks/) to convert journal posts to a variety of formats and as far as peer review, well we do that for free anyway. I’d love to be a part of something that looks at academic publication differently.