What’s going on with the CPN?

It’s been a few months since we last gave you an update on what the Critical Physiotherapy Network is up to, so here’s a short summary of things we’ve done recently and some of the projects we’ve got in the pipeline.  As always, if you’d like to be involved in anything that we’re doing, just get in touch.  Add a comment to the post, send us an email, Tweet us (@CriticaPhysio) or message us on Facebook (@CriticalPhysiotherapyNetwork).

Our first co-authored book – Manipulating Practices: A critical physiotherapy reader – has been an incredible success.  Published by Norway’s foremost scientific and technical publisher – Cappelen Damm Forlag – it has been downloaded more than any other book in the publisher’s history. More than 7,000 times in fact.  Our book launch in Norway was a great event and we’ve started talking about a follow-up book that might be about bringing physiotherapy and non-physiotherapy writers together around a common theme.  More on this soon.

Because we own the copyright for the book (which you can download for free here), we can do what we want with it.  We’ve started talking about supplementing the text with audio recordings of the chapters (see Michael Rowe’s recording, for instance), translations of each chapter into the author’s first language, and multimedia extensions to the original work.  We’re talking with the authors now to see what they might want to do.

Given how critical thinking is the CPN’s bread and butter, we’ve been planning a new, international, online critical physiotherapy course for a few months now.  We’re looking at something based around a term of monthly seminars, with online readings and support, led by CPN members, and targeting people who have a sense of what critical physiotherapy is, but perhaps not much experience or confidence.  Our next video conference planning meeting is next week if you’d like to join in.

We now publish a regular ‘notice’ about our work in the Canadian Physiotherapy Association’s monthly e-blast, and we edit an ongoing section in the Journal of Humanities in Rehabilitation, and we’re currently negotiating a multi-journal editorial exploring what critical physiotherapy means.

There will be a group of CPN members at this year’s In Sickness and In Health conference in Sydney.  A number of us have presented at this conference before, and whenever we do we take the opportunity to meet up and run some kind of event.  If you’re going, we’ll be in touch shortly to organise a get-together and possibly a study-day attached to the conference.

We decided not to submit an Focused Symposium application to next year’s WCPT congress in Geneva, but will look at the possibility of coordinating a half or a whole session on critical physiotherapy at the congress when the call comes out in May.  If you’re going to Geneva and want to be part of a CPN-related themed session, let us know and we’ll talk about how to best plan for that.

The CPN Exec has had some personnel changes over the last couple of months.  Barbara Gibson has stepped into an advisory/ex officio role after serving on the Exec since its inception in 2014.  Tobba Sudmann has stepped into Wenche Bjorbækmo’s shoes and Jeanette Praestegaard has replaced Simon Kirkegaard – someone else who has been with us since the beginning.  A huge thanks to them all for their amazing work getting our wee group off the ground.

And finally, in a bit of related news, a couple of CPN Exec members have helped to establish a new International Physiotherapy History Association.  The IPHA was formed after WCPT in Cape Town when more than 40 people turned up for an early Monday morning breakfast to discuss physiotherapy history.  I’ll be chairing the group in its early stages, and Nicky Wilson and I will be joined by Julia Lens, Rob Jones, Fiona Jenkins, Sandra Schiller and Glenn Ruscoe.  Nicky did Trojan work to get our first Focused Symposium application in – titled Nearly medicine – looking at the history of physiotherapy’s relationship to medicine, and we’ll be having our fourth Exec meeting next week.  Again, if you’d like to know more about the IPHA, let me know and I’ll add you to the contact list.

So, as usual, we have a lot of things on and are trying to fulfil our aim of being a positive force for an otherwise physiotherapy.  We are an organisation that relies on your energy and enthusiasm, so thank you for everything you’ve done for the group over the last few months.  As always, our goal of total complete world domination looks like it’s just over the horizon.