I'm sometimes asked what the 'Critical' in Critical Physiotherapy Network refers to. It's a good question, because there's more than one meaning for the term, and we are using it in quite a specific sense here. So here are some different meanings for the word critical, only some of which apply to the Network. Critical in the sense of expressing disapproval or negative judgement, as in; 'I don't like that' or 'I think that's wrong' Critical as in 'critical review'; the sort of thing that a lot of students are trained to do these days; to review a body of literature and say whether it's any good or not Critical care: that required by acutely ill people Critical in the sense … [Read more...] about Ways to be critical
Does physiotherapy’s hidden curriculum exclude men?
A recent article in The Conversation explored how training to be a surgeon subtly marginalised women and promoted the idea that surgery was a man's world (link). Surgical training was described as 'powerful, visible, gendered and discriminatory'. Over the last few months I've been writing and thinking a lot about the gendering of physiotherapy. Much of that has revolved around the ways that women masseuses in World War I first came into contact with young male bodies, and the brutal ways they went about rehabilitating them. (The image above is from a classic series of postcards that depicted the dominating and and fearful WWI masseuse - see Carden-Coyne, 2008). Anders Ottosson's … [Read more...] about Does physiotherapy’s hidden curriculum exclude men?
Shitty robots
A few blogposts ago, I wrote asking why it was that things had to work (link)? Why is it physiotherapists are obsessed with things working. Well one of our Critical Physiotherapy comrades read the post and pointed me to the beautiful, poetic and entirely useless work of Simone Giertz and her Shitty Robots. And then would you believe it, but two days later Simone is being interviewed on our local radio station (listen here). Simone builds robots that don't work. Or rather they work, but don't do anything useful. They are the antithesis of all of the supposedly 'useful' (and frankly poe-faced and self-righteous) mechanical contraptions now making their way into physiotherapy … [Read more...] about Shitty robots