Disruption is a lovely geological word. It suggests shaky ground and lava flows, destabilisation and disorganisation. Most people working in health care today are fed up with disruption though. Most would be perfectly happy if they never saw any more funding cuts, job freezes and reorganisations. Unfortunately we know that disruption is an everyday occurrence in a health care system going through a long, slow, seismic unsettling. But disruption need not be negative, and the Critical Physiotherapy Network is one small example of how a group of people are trying to change the rhetoric surrounding disruption and change. The key to this new approach lies with the ideas of openings … [Read more...] about New: Disruption
The (im)possibility of thinking under neoliberalism
The short video below (its just over 6 mins), previews a new paper (link here) by Bronwyn Davies, who is a fabulous educational thinker and scholar. Here she talks about how it's getting harder and harder to think in a climate that is increasingly anti-intellectual and anti-critique. She suggests that the threats of neo-liberalism reach into all spheres of our life and achieve their effects without us realising their power. Davies calls for a new spirit of critique. … [Read more...] about The (im)possibility of thinking under neoliberalism
Is qualitative research in decline just as physiotherapy ‘gets’ it?
Over the last few months I've been reading more and more about the demise of qualitative research. This isn't coming from clinical scientists and quantitative researchers, but from people who have been invested in the field since its inception in the late 1980s. The argument they make is that qualitative research has now become too formulaic, systematized and too heavily methodological. It's lost its critical power and forgotten what qualitative inquiry was meant to be able to do. One of the people who explains this best is probably Elizabeth St Pierre Adams, and in this recent video from last year's Australasian Association for Research in Education (AARE) conference, she explains … [Read more...] about Is qualitative research in decline just as physiotherapy ‘gets’ it?