Tobba Sudmann - 30 DoS - Day 19

1.       Tell us a little about your current work and study, especially how you think and practice critically

I’m affiliated to Western Norway University of Applied Sciences HVL as a full professor of public health and academic head of the PhD-program Health, function and participation. My work includes teaching and supervising MA and PhD students, and research. In addition to my work at HVL, I have a small clinical practice with riding physiotherapy. The critical element in my teaching, supervising, practice, and research emerges as a critical appreciation of anything and everything that crosses my desk or enters into my everyday life. I am particularly wary about tendencies to make people small in their own life; i.e. as oppression, discrimination, or marginalization. The PROGRESS PLUS framework is a superb reminder and guideline in these matters.

Some of my current research projects include E-health literacy, technological assistance in social housing, equine-assisted activities for incarcerated women, equine-facilitated physiotherapy for persons with severe and longstanding mental illnesses and/or substance use, and physical activity for persons with cognitive decline.

2.       What is it about critical physiotherapy that appeals to you?

The Critical Physiotherapy Network has given me peers and friend around the globe, who find it fruitful to share ideas for the further development of physiotherapy as practice, theory, and research, to include perspectives or theories from the social sciences and the humanities. The CPN offers a safe environment for trying out ideas, and for giving and receiving constructive critique. The CPN is a generous community, where differences in opinion or style are welcomed and tolerated

3.       What do you bring to the CPN?

I bring myself, my eagerness, my fantasy, and my creativity, as well as my fiery passion to the CPN. And I believe I have contributed to calling attention to interspecies interdependencies, and the importance of an ecocentric perspective, which I now think of as One Health.

4.       How would you like to see the critical physiotherapy community develop over the next few years?

I hope our community can contribute to more diversity and creativity in education, practice, and research. And I hope that the CPN community can help us focus on the aims and justifications of our teaching or treatment sessions, not just focusing on the means, i.e. numbers of kilos, numbers of repetition, pages read, and so forth.

5.       How would you like to see the broader physiotherapy profession develop?

I would like to see physiotherapy as a community more devoted to health promotion; a community that works hard to reduce social inequalities in health, who hold anti-oppressive practice as their main guideline, who thinks global and acts local, and who gets inspired by the ecocentric and One Health perspectives.