We are all midwives

A few days into the new year, CPN member Roger Kerry was recognised by JISC as one of the UK’s most social media savvy academics.  The award acknowledged Roger's longstanding contribution to innovation in education, including the Tweed project which uses social media to formulate reading lists based on people's favourite texts (see Twitter #physiosomereadinglist).

It would be nice to think that in the future, our new book Manipulating practices: A critical physiotherapy reader will make that list, and given the fact that it's been downloaded nearly 4,500 times since it was released last week, it should stand a chance.  (Remember, you can download the book in full, for free, from here.)

Roger contributes a superb chapter "Reconceptualising causation in evidence-based physiotherapy" to the book, and co-authored a chapter with Fiona Moffatt titled "The desire for “hands-on” therapy – a critical analysis of the phenomenon of touch".  These are just two of the 15 chapters, spanning an enormous range of practical and theoretical topics, including chapters on ethics, disability, touch, obesity, the performing arts, and the sociocultural basis of practice.

When we established the CPN, our intention was to create a safe space for radical and interesting new ideas to emerge: a place where people could move beyond the ordinary and taken-for-granted and imagine what might be possible in the future.

So while the CPN can't take any credit for Roger's recent success, we can at least ponder on the fact that the CPN is an organisation of 'midwives' who are delivering new ways of thinking and new ideas to physiotherapy.  Here's to more deliveries in 2018.