Jenny - "Critiquing Therapeutic Exercise"

Dr Jenny Setchell is an NHMRC Research Fellow in Physiotherapy in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Faculty of Health and Behavioural Sciences, The University of Queensland, Australia. Her research interests include post-structuralist critical perspectives on healthcare broadly, and physiotherapy specifically. Jenny researchers within the SocioHealthLab, which is a research collective that pursues social transformation in health and healthcare through applied socio-cultural research, on the topics of critical disability, stigma, pain, post-structuralism, new-materialism. Jenny is a Physio, radical thinker/doer, ex-acrobat and founding member of the Critical Physiotherapy Network (CPN).

In this podcast Jenny discusses troublesome aspects of therapeutic exercise, that are infrequently debated as the virtues of exercise are assumed to be obvious. In her paper "Keep fit: marginal ideas in contemporary therapeutic exercise" published in the Special Issue: Exercise is Medicine: Qualitative Contributions of Journal Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, it is argued that seeing therapeutic exercise as primarily ‘medical’ carries with it consequences – some recognised, others unseen – that are problematic and worthy of consideration. In the paper (and this podcast) Jenny explores how therapeutic exercise is being instrumentalised, normalised and constrained, arguing for much greater critical attention towards its putative ‘goodness’ and virtue as a health intervention. This is not, of course, to suggest that all therapeutic exercise is bad, only that in promoting some important uses, other effects and possibilities are marginalised, lost or remain unstated.