Eduan Breedt
About me
I am a cisgender, straight, White, English-speaking male of Dutch and English settler descent, born in Azania (South Africa) currently pursuing my PhD as an immigrant and uninvited settler on Treaty 6 territory in ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ Amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton), in so-called Canada. I trained and have worked as a physiotherapist in both Azania and Aotearoa (New Zealand), mainly in primarily in community-based musculoskeletal settings with people experiencing complex and persistent pain.
I am an interdisciplinary health scholar and educator working at the intersection of Critical Physiotherapy, Critical Rehabilitation Studies, and the social sciences. I have an interest in critical social theory, the geopolitics of rehabilitation, and community-based care. I am particularly drawn to solidarity politics: how we are situated within systems of power and how this shapes the ways we negotiate our roles, responsibility, and actions within inevitably messy relationships when doing community work.
About my work
My PhD uses post-structural philosophy and social theory to explore the concept of the ‘Body’ in physiotherapy, asking how it functions within neoliberal racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and Euro-American empire to modulate populations’ health, futures, imaginations, illnesses, and injuries. More broadly my research employs social theory and community-based methods to establish theoretical, conceptual, and analytical foundations for a more socially aware and politically engaged physiotherapy profession that not only cares for individuals but also works with community to challenge and transform the sociopolitical structures causing injury and illness.
In addition, I serve as an Assistant Editor on the Journal of Humanities and Rehabilitation as well as sit on the executive committee for the Critical Physiotherapy Network.
Email Ed: breedt@ualberta.ca
Other links
Selected publications
Breedt, E., Tichenor, E., & Barlott, T. (2026). Diagnosing the Body in Physiotherapy: The Passage from Discipline to Control. Physiotherapy Theory and Practice, 42(4), 609–633.
Breedt, E., Tichenor, E., McLeod, K., & Barlott, T. (2026). Rethinking posthumanism in rehabilitation science: Lessons from Indigenous, Black, and decolonial thought. Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine, 30(2),168-192.
Breedt, E., & Barlott, T. (2025). Physiotherapy’s Necessity for Ableism: Reifying Normal Through Difference. Disability & Society, 40(5), 1361–1384
Tichenor, E., Breedt, E., & Barlott, T. (forthcoming book) Deleuze, Guattari, and Health. Edinburgh University Press (Accepted)
