Walking and listening to the decolonising the physio curriculum guided reflection podcast hosted by @ShaunCleaver as part of #InBeta20

Reflections in this thread https://inbeta.uwc.ac.za/2020/09/13/20-decolonising-physiotherapy-education-unconference-2020/

Who are my people? Paused next to a church in my adopted home city of Birmingham. Feel like this question has been a challenge for me and others in England in recent years as we struggle to reconcile our identity with a sense of “we”

Have people been displaced to make place for my people? Pausing in the woods to consider this. We have so frequently been the displacers around the globe that I hadn’t really thought about this land, or how my ancestry would track back to land owners/those displaced from the land

What are the racial classification systems in my country? Still in the woods. Reflecting on the ways people are identified by racial / national / regional / religious groups in the UK how this is influenced by the UKs history

How has my location influenced my thinking? I find this section in some ways quite challenging as I have tended to associate enlightenment thinking and positivism with a move away from religion as an explanatory framework and to see this as mainly positive

...but I don’t think it’s the only form of knowledge, and so I’m wary of forms of knowledge being set as necessarily opposed... but I realise I am then left somewhat struggling to acknowledge colonialism and the subjugation of other forms of knowledge.

(ie in my narrative positivism has been punching up against an existing powerful institution, not used to subjugate)

Is convincing people of the value of physio akin to colonialism? Reflecting on Shaun’s account of working in Haiti and my own uncomfortable relationship with my limited experiences of a physio placement and gap year abroad and how my conception of them has changed over time