Drawing a long bow, I know, but with a few minor amendments, Loïc Wacquant could actually be talking about physiotherapy...or medicine...or any of the other health professions that adhere to the medical model: '...the [physiotherapy] merry-go-round is to [health] what pornography is to amorous relations: a mirror deforming reality to the point of the grotesque that artificially extracts [deviant movement] from the fabric of social relations in which they take root and make sense, deliberately ignores their causes and their meanings, and reduces their treatment to a series of conspicuous position takings, often acrobatic, sometimes properly unreal, pertaining to the cult of ideal … [Read more...] about Health as pornography
Social determinants of health and physiotherapy
I start a week of teaching on the social determinants of health on Monday with our 1st year physiotherapy students. It's part of a course/module we run at AUT called 'Physiotherapy and Health Priorities' and it looks at applying public health principles to our practice. Social determinants aren't something that physios have spent a lot of time studying in the past, and it's a bit alarming to see how little research is out there that points to a role for the profession. We're not even driving the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff on this issue: we're the people who pick up the patients who have left the ambulance after its already crashed. Clearly this is not a wise or enviable … [Read more...] about Social determinants of health and physiotherapy
New article ‘Mobility, empire, colonisation’ by Tony Ballantyne
From History of Australia, 2014, 11(2) Link to full text here. Abstract This article examines the role of mobility in the operation of modern maritime empires and identifies some of the particular ways in which mobility was constituted as a ‘problem’ in debates over colonisation. After briefly mapping a range of ways in which different forms of mobility underwrote the processes of empire, the article turns to the colony of Otago. It sketches how arguments about the meaning of different types of movement played out in a specific colonial location where tensions over fixity and mobility stood at the heart of struggles over the meaning of both ‘empire’ and ‘community’. … [Read more...] about New article ‘Mobility, empire, colonisation’ by Tony Ballantyne