Cécile Abboudi - 30 DoS - Day 10
Hi! My name is Cécile; I am a French physiotherapy, a PhD student in public health and a teacher. I am also a 43 years old young mother.
After fifteen years of a rather tiring private practice in a medium-sized town in the south of France, I am back at school with the hope and intuition that it will bring a breath of fresh air to my routine. I discovered the human and social sciences; it was a revelation! I understand the potential of these theoretical tools for my practice. It's invigorating! I can finally begin to understand the inner workings of the situations that have marked my experience. At last, I can see the sand grains that were in the way of my development. Because I was aware that what was bothering me was not necessarily problematic, nor questioning for my colleagues. In short, here I am in my doctorate, after a long and hectic journey. I made detours, but I always moved forward and kept my course. My insatiable curiosity has been both a powerful engine and a GPS. I am at the end of the journey of initiation that is the PhD. I am doing work rooted in the field of social psychology and sociology. In France, physiotherapy is still under medical prescription even if things are moving. So, I explored the points of view (social representations) of physicians, physiotherapists and patients. The basic question was: what is physiotherapy? In a word, I question the obvious. To do so, I studied different corpora: interviews, literary text, dictionary definitions, questionnaire and scientific articles. I take stock of the presuppositions that each one has about his group, his practice, but also about what he imagines the other one thinks about his group (we call this mutual clairvoyance). It is a game of comparison to find the common points and differences between the groups. There is also a historical dimension, as I am studying the writings of a founder of French physiotherapy. My work is situated in the socioconstructivist paradigm, but I am approaching the systemic paradigm. I have highlighted great differences in social representations, but fortunately also common points. There is also a strong influence of groupthink between physiotherapists and doctors, and different forms of hierarchies in this triad. My approach is also relatively atypical in the social sciences because I use lexicometry a lot. This is quite common in France, but rarer in English-speaking countries. At the same time, I supervise research theses of physiotherapy students.
To the question about "how I think and practice critically", I would answer that it is a kind of second nature on the one hand. I mean, this curiosity has never left me since I was a child. On the other hand, I would say that it is a mixture of experience and biography that makes me a social and cultural mix. My mother-in-law says "rougail". It's a Reunionese dish (from a small French island in the middle of the Indian Ocean) that contains lots of small, finely chopped vegetables and accompanies dishes. A kind of pudding in its Creole condiment version! So, I attribute to my mixed origins this lack of formatting that makes me see outside the box. My way of thinking critically, as I said above, is that what is obvious is not necessarily obvious to me. And so, I seek to understand.
What attracts me to critical physiotherapy is the caring environment, the intellectual pleasure, and the fact that I am not alone in my questioning. And also, that the questions asked are enlightening because they are approached in an energising way.
My background, my atypical profile of technical and disciplinary competences, as well as my curiosity associated with my creativity allow me to think that I can participate or accompany my peers in a research process aiming at a constructive and caring criticism of physiotherapy. My fertile and communicative imagination can help to reshape the contours of this (r)evolving discipline and to create or maintain links. I am convinced that the richness is in the mix (epistemological and relational) rather than in the closure and orthodoxy.
I believe that this network, and physiotherapy by extension, would benefit from actively promoting and coordinating research. It could offer internships and post-doctoral fellowships for critical physiotherapists, or summer schools (theoretical or methodological).
My vision and wish for the physiotherapy profession would be to see a unification and decompartmentalisation of the rehabilitation professions. I believe that we have a common mission and that it can only be achieved through cohesion. Of course, I would like to see research made more accessible, for example through formats such as action research in private practice, hospitals or on assignment in companies and schools.