Art as a Deterritorialising Vehicle for a Nomadic Physiotherapy

This chapter proposes the need for redefined, transdisciplinary approaches to art and health education and research. We question Physiotherapy education which continues to privilege biomedical knowledge and marginalises cultural, philosophical and sociological perspectives. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, we propose a nomadic practice and advocate education, practice and research that creates lines of flight which break through the control of discipline, context or methodology and consequent outcomes.

We explore how transdisciplinary education can use the creative approaches of art to create a counterculture that draws on aspects of new materialism to consider how art can offer opportunities to explore movement and non- interactions. We illuminate what this might make possible within physiotherapy and advocate moving towards a nomadic therapeutic practice that is becoming.

The chapter recognises how emerging transdisciplinary research can prioritise approaches that embrace the unexpected and highlight examples of the human and non-human as co-generators of knowledge. In advocating creative process as an alternative to territorialized physiotherapy practices enclosed within disciplinary criteria, we suggest communicable forms of knowledge in new, more productive forms.