Canada

Dr Patty Thille, PhD, PT is an interdisciplinary researcher – a medical sociologist by PhD, and a physiotherapist by first degree. She works as a research-intensive assistant professor in the Department of Physical Therapy at the University of Manitoba in Canada. Her scholarship brings critical social scientific theories and qualitative methodologies into primary care and rehabilitation research, including both the delivery of services and health professions education. Her scholarship emphasizes equity, addressing interpersonal and structural drivers of stigmatization in clinical settings, and fostering reflexivity to create opportunities to improve equity and relationships within health care. She sits on the executive of the international Critical Physiotherapy Network, and is the lead editor of a forthcoming anthology of critical physiotherapy scholarship.

https://umanitoba.ca/rehabilitation-sciences/faculty-staff/patty-thille

I’ve always had a curious nature, and in particular, a curiosity about the body. As a trained Yoga Instructor with a background in Sociology and Art History, it is natural for me to think critically and inquisitively about the nature of the body, and the body in relation to space and its surroundings.

More recently, my own lived experience with navigating chronic pain that began in 2022 drives me to deepen my exploration with personal research about how pain connects us to, or disconnects us from ourselves and the human experience in our own bodies.

With newly introduced pain, I’ve learned that it’s not just the big life experiences that are changed, but also the little every day things that we might have taken for granted in a previously abled-body. Often not many other variables have changed around us, but we continue on in a body that experiences the world in a new way, adapting and adjusting where we need to, with our bodies informing new ways of existing in space.

https://umanitoba.ca/rehabilitation-sciences/faculty-staff/patty-thille