Each day over the next week I'll post up an abstract for a paper being presented by a member of the Critical Physiotherapy Network at the In Sickness and In Health conference in Mallorca in June 2015. (You can find more information on the conference here.) Suffrage suspended? Counter-narratives of womens’ quest for professional legitimacy David Nicholls A great deal has been written about the role the suffrage movement played in the development of nursing and midwifery during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Much of this research points to roles played by middle- and upper-class women in professionalizing socially validated notions of caring, and the importance of this … [Read more...] about Suffrage suspended? Counter-narratives of womens’ quest for professional legitimacy
Mobilizing Desire: A Deleuzian re-formation of movement
Each day over the next week I'll post up an abstract for a paper being presented by a member of the Critical Physiotherapy Network at the In Sickness and In Health conference in Mallorca in June 2015. (You can find more information on the conference here.) Mobilizing Desire: A Deleuzian re-formation of movement By Barbara Gibson & David Nicholls In the field of rehabilitation medicine, enabling mobility is a primary focus of intervention. Mobilities establish one's place in the world both in terms of material location and through the meanings assigned to different bodily movements and configurations. For example, wheelchairs and walkers allow access to the world but also mark the … [Read more...] about Mobilizing Desire: A Deleuzian re-formation of movement
Is behaviourism the future for physiotherapy?
Yesterday, I took part in one of the regular and always enjoyable Physiotalk Tweet Chats (#physiotalk). This one was on the role of physiotherapy in exercise prescription. As usual, the discussion ranged widely over all sorts of topics: whether physiotherapists were experts in exercise prescription and what needs to be taught in the UG curriculum not being the least of them. One thing that came through strongly was a desire to manage the client/patient's behaviour. Words like adherence, compliance and motivation kept coming up and people seemed to recognise that all the skill in the world wouldn't matter to the therapist if the patient didn't engage. As someone who's read their fair … [Read more...] about Is behaviourism the future for physiotherapy?
Being critical
In yesterday's post I mentioned the Hybrid Pedagogy site and the work they had done to define what it means to be critical in education. As a critical physiotherapy network, it's probably important that we do the same thing and articulate how we think we are critical, because there are so many different meanings for the word, it could easily be misleading. Critical can mean: Intensive care and the physiotherapy that is given to people in life-threatening situations Critically and systematically analysing the quality and content of research articles These are almost certainly the approaches to criticality most familiar to physiotherapists today. The first is a very specialised field of … [Read more...] about Being critical
Update on philosophy of walking
A few months ago, I posted a review of three brilliant books about walking. I wanted to highlight these books because walking is not only a fundamental part of everyday life, it's also a defining feature of a lot of physiotherapy practice, and I'm often bemused by how narrow-minded physiotherapists are about it. It's almost a metaphor for the profession: here is a human experience that has been written about for centuries, that engages all manner of human achievement, and we've reduced it to mere gait patterns. The point about all three books is that walking is so much more than heel strike and toe off. Not that these are unimportant, but in the grand scheme of things I don't believe … [Read more...] about Update on philosophy of walking
Podcast – Prof Teresa Mangum – The Future of the Academic and Public Humanities
This podcast if the first in a series of lectures on the future of the humanities in public life. The series began on 28 November 2014 with a leture by Professor Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Centre for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa. Professor Magnum talks about how the humanities are being systematically undermined by discourses that privilege economic efficiency and utilitarian learning. There are a lot of parallels with the way we are seeing the long-valued capabilities of empathy, caring and altruism in education and health care practice being replaced by capitalistic notions of measurable cost and benefit. Abstract: In the United States, the pressures on the … [Read more...] about Podcast – Prof Teresa Mangum – The Future of the Academic and Public Humanities
My critical physiotherapy Christmas list
Santa is a busy chap so needs help to know who's been naughty and whose been nice. I've tried my best to be nice this year. Honestly I have. So I thought I'd draw up a critical physiotherapy Christmas list of the things I'd like in my stocking on Christmas morning. Dear Santa, Could I please have: A physiotherapy journal that refuses, on principal, to publish any article where the authors use the words evidence-based practice, musculoskeletal, neurological, cardiorespiratory, mixed methods, systematic, descriptive, thematic, or any word ending in -itis. A return to a properly funded public health system. An overhaul to the weighting of academic journals. I'd like all journal's … [Read more...] about My critical physiotherapy Christmas list