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
Health as pornography
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
Eulogy to the NHS
I was really moved by this piece by Harry Smith in The Guardian on Wednesday. It described perfectly the sadness I'm sure a lot of British people feel with the slow decline of the NHS and the cynical way governments - of the left and the right - have used the rhetoric of neoliberalism to dismantle this once proud institution. I can remember the stories my parents told me about the hardships they had suffered and the huge impact social welfare had in their lives. My grandfather was a coal miner in the English midlands and his family were so poor that my great grandmother would rattle plates around on Sundays so that the neighbours thought they were eating Sunday dinner. Like Harry Smith's … [Read more...] about Eulogy to the NHS
Zachariah A et al (2013) ‘Towards a critical medical practice: reflections on the dilemmas of medical culture today’
A recent book review for a book titled 'Towards a Critical Medical Practice: Reflections on the Dilemmas of Medical Culture Today' made me reflect on one of the prevailing questions facing physiotherapy in the 21st century. The review said this: The study of the postcolonial Indian healthcare system with its manifold sociocultural complexities and incongruities offers rich cross-cultural perspectives; the interplay between the legacies of colonialism and the shifting priorities of a vibrant but bureaucratically entrenched state apparatus reveals that it has over the decades succumbed to pressures from neo-liberalism and the free market, and that its initial commitments to providing care … [Read more...] about Zachariah A et al (2013) ‘Towards a critical medical practice: reflections on the dilemmas of medical culture today’