What is ParaDoxa?
“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons” - Gilles Deleuze
ParaDoxa is a site for people interested in studying the many ‘posts’ now disrupting orthodox healthcare: These posts include:
Post-humanism
Post-professional healthcare
Post-conventional practice
Post-feminism
Post-critical, post-normative thinking
Post-qualitative research
Post-colonialism
Post-modernism and post-structuralism
Through ParaDoxa my aim is to constantly ‘challenge all ideological commitments and all power discourses. Instead of providing ideological tools to fight against or preserve the status quo… to deconstruct all truth claims. Rather than protecting or defending certain groups of people, the ambition of poststructuralist analysis is to destabilize, decenter, and subvert all essentialist claims made in the name of specific groups’ (Siniša Malešević, doi:10.1080/08913811.2022.2122171).
How does it work?
"Ideas won't keep; something must be done about them" - Alfred North Whitehead
ParaDoxa is a free digital newsletter delivered to your email inbox.
Subscribers receive a weekly digest of the latest ‘post-‘ research, as well as news updates, editorials, links to podcast episodes, and, in a few months, our first courses.
ParaDoxa is also the main news outlet for the 8th International In Sickness & In Health conference, to be held in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand, from 13-15 February 2024. You can jump to the static site for the conference by clicking here.
Why is the site called ParaDoxa?
"The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from old ones" - John Maynard Keynes
The name ParaDoxa comes from a phrase Henri Bergson used to refer to thinking that was against (Grk. para) the convention, common sense beliefs, and people’s expectations, habits, and opinions (Grk. doxa).
The site, then, is meant as a place where radical ideas in healthcare can stretch their legs.
Key principles
“This is not the time to reawaken old oppositions, but rather to seek what lies above and beyond all opposition” - Friedrich Schelling
ParaDoxa will:
Be theory-first. Following the adage that “There is nothing so practical as a good theory”, ParaDoxa celebrates the kinds of slow, deep theorising that are so often lacking in a healthcare world driven by speed, productivity, and pragmatism;
Focus on new concepts, ideas, and theories of healthcare, especially those found in the writings of people like Henri Bergson, Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Georges Canguilhem, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Félix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Graham Harman, Erin Manning, Tim Morton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Raymond Ruyer, Margrit Shildrik, Gilbert Simondon, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Simone Weil, and Alfred North Whitehead;
Try to build an international community-curated knowledge network connected through post-critical thinking in healthcare;
Be post-disciplinary and post-professional. ParaDoxa anticipates a time when the traditional health professions are less central in the delivery of healthcare, and myriad new opportunities and ways of thinking about health and illness emerge;
Draw from a wide range of disciplines, including those traditionally ‘outside’ healthcare, for instance, architecture, ecology, fiction, cultural studies, music, philosophy, poetry, sociology, theatre studies, and the visual arts;
Always try to present work that is challenging and interesting in a thoughtful and respectful way.
What I hope you will NOT find in ParaDoxa
”When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe” - John Muir
Human exceptionalism. One of the founding principles of ParaDoxa is that future healthcare should not privilege humans at the expense of our planet, and all the entities — large and small, virtual and real — that flow within it.
Zealotry. ParaDoxa is based on a postmodern skepticism of anyone’s claim that they know ‘the answer’, so this will not be the place for conspiracy theories, gurus, cults, and media influencers. Paraphrasing Foucault, I’m not saying everything is bad, only that everything is dangerous.
Methodolatry. I’m fully in on Elizabeth St. Pierre’s argument here that traditional humanist qualitative research has ‘reached its limits as it failed to do justice to the complexity of the world, especially after the ontological, posthuman, affective, new material, and new empirical turns’ (doi:10.1177/1077800418772634). So, you will rarely see qualitative methods-focused research in ParaDoxa. There will be no lack of empiricism, but it will be of the Deleuzian transcendental sort rather than the thematic analysis sort that is so common in qualitative healthcare research today.
Campaigning. This is not a campaigning site. It is not ‘critical’ in the sense of being emancipatory, but rather critical in the sense of challenging our taken-for-granted assumptions. ‘If the aim is to productively critique rather than simply reform existing structures,’ as the great Margrit Shildrick said recently, ‘then it is necessary to make use of – and go beyond – elements of feminist, queer, poststructuralist and postmodernist theory to disrupt… conventional meanings’ (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Who is ParaDoxa for?
“Our thinking was limited by convention (the most subtle but oppressive dictator)” - Pip Williams
This isn’t an exclusive list, and I hope many people find ParaDoxa provocative and interesting, but it is primarily designed for academics, clinicians, researchers, and students interested in ‘post-’ philosophies, theories, and ideas and the ways they might be applied to healthcare.
About me
“What he needed was to find fifty more people like him, who had stopped being themselves without realizing it” - Jennifer Egan
My main work is as a Professor of Critical Physiotherapy at AUT University in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. So I’m a full-time researcher, writer, teacher, and supervisor for students both at home and abroad.
Although my professional background is as a respiratory physiotherapist (working mainly with children and older adults with chronic breathing problems), I’ve always been more of a historian, philosopher, and sociologist of my profession.
In 2008 I completed my PhD titled Body politics: A Foucauldian discourse analysis of physiotherapy practice. And in 2014 I set up the first international Critical Physiotherapy Network, the profession’s first International Physiotherapy History Association, and helped found the Environmental Physiotherapy Association.
Early in 2022, I finished the second book of a planned three-book series ‘diagnosing’ physiotherapy as a profession. The first — The End of Physiotherapy — looked at how physiotherapy had arrived at this point in its history from a Foucauldian perspective. And the most recent one — Physiotherapy Otherwise (Tuwhera Open Access, 2022) looked at the profession sociologically. I’ve co-edited two collections of critical physiotherapy writings (Manipulating Practices and Mobilizing Knowledge). I’ve also written a lot about healthcare history, the sociology of the professions, and physiotherapy reform. If you’d like to know more about my academic writing, my full publication history and CV are here.
In recent years, my focus has fallen squarely on philosophy and the work of Gilles Deleuze, object-oriented ontologies, and more-than-human ways of thinking about healthcare. And my hope is to finish the 3rd book in the series using ‘post’ philosophy to analyse physiotherapy over the next two or three years.
But the last word goes to Gadamer;
“nobody has the last word” - Hans-Georg Gadamer
ParaDoxa is registered with the National Library of New Zealand as publisher (ISSN 3021-1646).
