IFF Research Journal

Dear reader,
“ Choosing the path of least resistance”. Does this sound like a familiar strategy to you?

Well, I decided to choose the path of least resistance as the motto for this new volume. That is of course not very ambitious.That is not very scientific either, I know very well, but it was an option that made it possible to do this work with a low budget and little manpower, in reasonable time.

This project was put into physical existence one year ago and it is still at its very beginning. For a second or so, I fancied about a ‘real’ research journal, with peer review and a research network and..., but after this second my pragmatism quickly took over, I decided to start small, use these first volumes for experimenting with possibilites and not try to forcefully drag a high-end-goal out of nothing. And anyways, what would I have done with an editorial board but nothing to feed them? So the first realistic goal was to get material anyhow.

One way to receive material is that people submit articles. After Vol 1 was published, I received five submissions over the time of a few months – coming to my big pleasure from all over the world. Four of them are included here. Jim Stephens (USA), Rose Eisenberg (Mexico), Odette Guimond (Quebec/CAN) and Robert Webb (AUS), are included, one more from Argentina I unfortunately couldn’t include (but still: thank you!), because it was, not related enough to scientific exploration – well that is one serious criterion after all.

Then, cruising through the research lists of Ryan Nagy ((http://www.psych.utah.edu/feldenkrais/research.html) and Werner Kraus (http://feldenkrais-method.org/en/node/860) I had a second idea: Aren’t there a lot of thesises and dissertations about the Feldenkrais work lingering out there, waiting to be read, but hard to find?
After sending a lot of emails to every country with a Feldenkrais guild office, I ended up with four more pieces (let’s not get into the issue of dragging answers out of the world wide web here…), patiently waiting for publication:
Grit Gürlich & Volker Neubeck (Germany), Warwick Long (New Zealand), Staffan Elgelid (USA/Sweden) and Larry Goldfarb (USA) spent their scientific „masterpieces“ on diverse aspects of the Feldenkrais Method and were happy to provide it for publication online here.

My secret wish was to find more material in different languages. One in Spanish, one in Swedish, one in Italian… I tried, but was not successful this time. Still, this is one of the advantages of publishing this research journal on the internet. We have endless space to place publications in any language here, just remember this, when you are about to complain about the medium we chose for this enterprise!

What else do you need to know about this volume?
I drew from Werner Kraus concerning the selection of material: “The selecting criteria for the articles of this edition are not arranged along the line of “good” or “bad” research.” No, it is available research at this point, I have to add.

The order in which they are presented is simply alphabetical after last name of first author. No bigger secret to this, honestly. Shorter articles are presented as full text and as a pdf which you can download on your computer and print easier. Longer articles and thesises are available only as pdf-download.
For articles that were published elsewhere before and where we had problems receiving permission for reprint, we provide a link to the respective journal, so that you can find and purchase it easily yourself, if you want to.

Well, that’s about it, I don’t want to add more here but send a big THANK YOU to Kathrin Achenbach and Neil Schill, the web designers, Lynette Reid, my contact to the IFF board, as well as the IFF board members themselves, in making this project possible.

Welcome to Volume 2 of the IFF Academy Feldenkrais Research Journal, give us feedback, submit material and, come on guys, participate, end this few-women-show!