Early on last Friday morning, I gave a keynote lecture to the inaugural Environmental Physiotherapy Association Festival.
This incredible virtual event running asynchronously over the whole weekend was curated by the equally amazing Filip Maric.
I thought I’d post up the video of my talk here because it focuses on the work I’ve been doing over the last few months.
Having worked first on a critical history of physiotherapy, and then a sociology of it as a profession, I’m now working on a new book on the philosophies of the physical therapies.
The ‘post’ philosophies particularly will do a lot of the theoretical heavy lifting in the book, but they take something of a back seat in this talk in favour of some quite down-to-earth analyses of the seeming obviousness of the concept of therapy.
You would think that there would be a wealth of rich writing on the word ‘therapy’ and the meaning it holds for physiotherapists; after all, it does make up half of the profession’s name. But this is not the case. In fact, there is nothing. The meaning of therapy is just assumed to be coherent and universal.
So, in this talk I try to challenge the taken-for-granted obviousness of therapy and explore some of the ways Deleuzian thinking might reimagine it.
*Although this talk references physiotherapy specifically, I think many of the questions raised would be applicable to all therapy in all its forms: psychotherapy, occupational therapy, pharmacotherapy, retail therapy, and so on.
Thank you, David - your questions are really challenging and something facilitating further thinking
Inspiring inquiry-thank you!