Idea 23: Collaborate on a critical physiotherapy book (2 mins)
Every day during September we will post up an idea for you to vote on. The most popular ideas will become the things that the inaugural Organizing Committee of the Critical Physiotherapy Network focuses on in 2015. So please make sure you cast your vote at the bottom of each post.
A couple of years ago, a friend of mine suggested it might be a good time to edit a book that brought together different critical perspectives on physiotherapy. A few of us had collaborated on a special edition of the journal Physiotherapy Theory and Practice (link here), and she thought that there was enough depth to the material to produce a bigger manuscript. At the time, I wasn't sure there were enough of us thinking critically in physiotherapy to do it justice. I don't think that now. So maybe now would be a good time to revisit the idea.
Physiotherapists are getting very good at producing edited collections and collaborative ventures. In recent years, I've been involved in a few projects with Joy Higgs and her colleagues at Charles Sturt University's Education for Practice Institute. Franziska Trede, Narelle Patton and Diana Tasker - all members of our Network - are teachers and researchers within the Institute, which produces some of the leading writing on practice-based education through a publishing collaboration with Sense Publishing in Amsterdam (see a list of their recent manuscripts here). It's the kind of knowledge and experience that we now have in the group, that wasn't there 10 years ago, that makes a critical physiotherapy book a real possibility.
So, should we collaborate on a critical physiotherapy book?
Post update: please note that voting closed on 7 October 2014 (results are available here), but please feel free to post your comments in the space below.
Since this post was published in September 2014, network members have successfully collaborated on a project to bring together a book call Rethinking Rehabilitation (follow this link for more information).