One of the things we want to do with our Critical Physiotherapy Network is to promote people writing critically about physiotherapy. As well as posting up recent publications and maintaining an archive of resources, we'll profile the authors and try to get behind their work. In this piece, Tone Dahl-Michelsen -Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Professions, Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Sciences, Norway (link to Tone's profile and CV) talks about her recent paper When bodies matter: Significance of the body in gender constructions in physiotherapy education. You can find a link to the article here. Abstract This article examines which bodily … [Read more...] about Tone Dahl-Michelsen on ‘When bodies matter’
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
3 books on the philosophy of walking
A few months ago, an English translation of Frédéric Gros's book 'A Philosophy of Walking' came out, which prompted me to think about what walking means to physiotherapists and whether some of the more recent philosophies of walking might help us think about what walking means to us as practitioners, philosophers of movement, and walkers. Walking is a subject that hasn't received a lot of philosophical attention. Like movement, posture and function, they are ideas we, as physiotherapists, claim some ownership over. We certainly teach a lot about these concepts and do a lot of research into aspects of these phenomena, but do we don't really know what we mean when we say physiotherapy is … [Read more...] about 3 books on the philosophy of walking