The CPN year in review

Notwithstanding everything else that’s gone on this year, we’ve had another busy and productive 12 months in the CPN.

We now have just over 700 members in 49 countries.

The website has attracted 60,000 more views this year and we’ve managed to produce 130 blogposts (nearly 900 since the site was established six years ago).

We’ve published our second edited collection of critical physiotherapy writings – Mobilizing knowledge: Critical Reflections on Foundations and Practices – which was two years in the making and involved 39 authors from seven different countries and 15 different professional disciplines.

We ran a second Critical Physiotherapy Course over six months between April and November, and created a Vimeo site to host all of the videos so you can watch the talks back, in full, at your leisure.

We’ve posted a CPN Digest of 15 new findings from around the Internet every Thursday/Friday each week, including a mammoth 100-item post in early August celebrating the Digest century.

Our annual 30 Days of September campaign proved to be one of our most popular, with three different critical physiotherapy resources posted each day for the whole month.

We have our first active subgroup – Deutsche CPN – for German speaking members, being coordinated by founding CPN member and founding Chair of the Environmental Physiotherapy Association, Filip Maric. The group has nearly 50 members and has met regularly online during the year.

And our fantastic CPN Executive now has nine members: co-chairs Dave Nicholls (New Zealand) and Anna Rajala (Finland), ably supported by Wenche Bjorbækmo (Norway), Tone Dahl-Michelsen (Norway), Lucy Inyang Edet (Nigeria), Aydee Luisa Robayo (Colombia), Tobba Sudmann (Norway), Adriane Vieira (Brazil), and Nicky Wilson (UK).

So what about 2021?

We’re going to do some work on the website, including tidying up some of the many resources we’ve accumulated over the years.

There will be more of the ‘op-ed type’ blogposts that had been a feature of the group in the past, but fell away in the 2nd half of the year.

We’ll be starting work on our next ‘big project’ – probably some kind of physiotherapy-art collaborative self-published work (more on this in the New Year).

And we’ll also be keeping all of the established things going, like the Critical Physiotherapy Course, the weekly CPN Digests, and the 30 Days of September campaign.

On a personal note, I’ll be spending the summer finishing off a follow up book to The end of physiotherapy. Due out in the 2nd half of the year, Physiotherapy Otherwise will be published by MIT Press and is shaping up very nicely so far.

A couple of final thoughts…

At our annual CPN Exec Strategic Planning meeting in November, most of our past Exec members met with the current Exec to make plans for next year.

A lot of our conversation was about the future of the Network.

When we set the CPN up in 2014, our goal was to create a safe space for critically-minded physiotherapists to think, talk and work together. We feel we’ve mostly done that now.

So what next?

Having created this space, how do we use it? Do we keep it as it is, or change it? Do we shift our focus to new things, or concentrate on the community we’ve built? Do we shut it down and start something new?

We’ll be talking a lot more about this over 2021, so if you have any thoughts or ideas, please write a comment in this post or send us a message.

I personally want to thank everyone in the CPN who gave up their time freely this year to help support this amazing community. Special thanks go to our Exec: Anna, Adriane, Aydee, Lucy, Nicky, Tobba, Tone, and Wenche who, despite incredibly trying circumstances, met every month to shape and support the Network. You’re amazing!

And to all of our members, 2021 will be better! Thank you for all of your passion and persistence, love and support.

We will see you in the New Year!

Dave Nicholls