A year in review
I haven’t written many personal pieces this year (more on that below), but I’m feeling in a reflective mood so, if you’ll indulge me, I’ll try to sum up what a wondrous year 2023 has been.
A challenge: Organising ISIH 2024
Offering to host the 8th international In Sickness & In Health conference in Aotearoa New Zealand in two months time felt like — still feels like — an incredible honour. Outside the Critical Physiotherapy Network (CPN), the ISIH community is my extended family. I’ve been to five of the last seven conferences, and the friends I’ve made over that time have been so important to me in my working career. Learning how to plan a conference has also been a steep but rewarding hike. (AI tools promise to make many laborious tasks easier, but they were nowhere to be seen when I spent a March hand scraping the first authors’ email addresses from three years worth of a bunch of health sociology journals to build our contact list.) I really hope next year’s conference will be one of the best yet and the spread and depth of peoples’ abstracts fills me with optimism.
Something to be proud of: ParaDoxa
It’s by no means perfect, but I’ve become quite proud of this little corner of the Internet. Stepping away from a decade of blogging for the CPN felt momentous, but I’m glad I did it. I needed to try something new, and the CPN needed new impetus. I kept the Weekly Digests going and added some podcasting. The 12 5-4-1 interviews I’ve done this year have been a blast. Researching people’s interests and chatting to them about their work through the lens of their peers has been inspirational. I also loved writing the two series on post-humanism and post-professionalism. I’ll try to do more of those blog series next year.
Something to look forward to: A new book
After I finished Physiotherapy Otherwise at the end of 2021 I began a year-long sabbatical. It was while I was on sabbatical that I decided to start ParaDoxa. I also decided on the subject of a new book I wanted to write, and began where I always begin with the heavy reading. I love long-form writing for its slow, deliberate pace and the space it gives you to develop ideas in three dimensions. But for me, that joy only comes with some hard slog, working through concepts and ideas that can sometimes mangle your melon. A book is always a leap into the unknown for me, and I draw heavily from other theorists and philosophers who often feel like a lighthouse in a dense sea fog. But I’ve always felt it’s been worth it, and I always get to the point where I can see a book taking shape. I’m at that point now and the next year promises to be filled with exciting epiphanies.
Something to work on next year: More personal blogging
Over the last few weeks I’ve been collating the 1,000 or so blog posts I wrote over a decade for the CPN and the IPHA. Reading some of them again made me realise that I’d stopped using blogposts as an exercise in drafting. If you approach them as a temporary, unfinished and ephemeral text, blogposts can be a great way to develop ideas. That’s not to say that your reading of them doesn’t matter, only that the main reason I’ve written blogposts in the past has been to work out ideas in my own head that I can then incorporate into my academic writing and teaching. I want to do more of that next year, and inflect the work with a post-critical, post-human healthcare perspective. Finding ways to express the more-than-human is really hard, and I have no answers yet. Testing those ideas in blogs might help and, perhaps, that helps others too.
My five things from 2023
Taking inspiration from the 5-4-1 interview format, here are five recommendations for you for the holiday season. I’ve come back to these weekly, sometimes daily, over the last year and I think you’ll like them:
Jason Kottke’s fine hypertext products. Kottke has been sending quirky links from around the web for 25 years now, and he rarely fails to make me smile. A lot of the left-field links I add to the Weekly Digest come from here. And if you like this sort of thing, you might also like this and this.
Daniel Lapoujade’s Aberrant Movements. This, more than any book this year, mangled my melon. Originally published in 2017, Aberrant Movements analyses Deleuze and Guattari’s entire body of work as ‘the schizophrenic processes of the unconscious and the nomadic line of flight traversing history—in short, the forces that permeate life and thought’. Heady stuff and almost as opaque as D&G’s own writings, but I’d say it’s a must-read for anyone trying to think with Deleuze and Guattari.
JJSauma’s Selector Radio Show on Mixcloud. I listen to a lot of dub techno and ambient music during the day — a blissful blend of pure rhythm and sound — and, to me, Jiménez-Sauma’s mixes are the best. He’s no academic slouch, either, with a masters degree in sound and music computing, he knows how to make great music on so many levels. There’s a link to his homepage here.
You can’t have failed to notice that there’s an arms race going on to develop (read, ‘sell’) AI bots and tools to you at the moment. But the Internet is an irrepressible beast and there are still quite a lot of developers working on tools without the profit motive in mind. My favourite AI tool this year has been Research Rabbit. Developed by the Open Collective, it is a completely free tool that helps you link research together. Fantastically useful and well worth supporting.
And the sort-of-non-work-related book I’ve recommended most often this year has been Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass. Beautifully written, searingly critical and anarchistic, but also joyous, rebellious and heart-warming, it’s a fine read and a great piece of critical social history.
So finally, thank you to all of you who have read, commented, emailed, enjoyed or been stimulated by ParaDoxa this year. Here’s to 2024. Let’s hope for more of the same, but different.