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Please see the President's message.

Dick Magill as Past-President planned the meeting

The following is a statement of the objectives of the meeting as prepared by Dick Magill.

Conference Theme: "Movement and Mobility: Essentials for Daily Living." Quality of life is in large part dependent on one's capability to engage in coordinated movement in all aspects of daily life. Whether the daily task involves getting out of one's bed and walking to the bathroom, keyboarding at a computer at work, or riding a bicycle as a means of transportation or exercise, movement and mobility serve as key factors in determining the level of success and independence one can achieve at home, work, or play. The goal of the program is to establish the importance of movement and mobility for all people by providing Academy members an opportunity to become acquainted with research and professional practice issues related to the multi-disciplinary nature of movement and mobility as they relate to our daily lives.

Keynote Address: What can research concerning movement and mobility in daily living mean to people? - Wojtek Chodzko-Zajko, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Vendien Lecture: Learning issues related to movement and mobility in daily living - Timothy D. Lee, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

Scott Kretchmar's reflections upon the 2004 annual meeting

The following is the introduction to the summary of the 2003 annual meeting given by Scott Kretchmar. It is titled, "Jigsaw Puzzles and River Banks: Two Ways of Picturing Our Future."

Papers at Academy meetings can be thought of as pieces from jigsaw puzzles. Each year we gather to put some of these pieces from our various sub-disciplines together. By doing so we hope to produce a more complete picture of human activity.

The employment of this metaphor over the years has been useful in helping us to understand our interdisciplinary field, and it conjures up positive images of cooperation, mutual respect, and intellectual humility. Nevertheless, we may be ready for a new metaphor, one that is both more accurate and inspiring.

We can picture ourselves working at different locations along a river bank. Some of us work upstream, near the headwaters, at the molecular and genetic level. Others work on anatomy, physiology, culture, psychological well-being, ethics, and even spirituality-all different places along the shore as we move down the river toward the broad and deep waters by the bay. But no matter what our location, we all work on water in one form or another. This forces us to come to grips with our interdependence as researchers and with far more complex notions of causation that have been popular heretofore. The riverbank metaphor promises a kind of cooperation, unity, and mutual appreciation that cannot be gained when we come to interdisciplinary meetings carrying our independently produced and prized puzzle pieces.

The papers delivered at the 2004 Academy Meetings reflect the fact that many of us are reading outside our own areas, and we are finding partial confirmation of our own work from both upstream and downstream sites. In short, we are beginning to enjoy the comraderie and productivity of those who choose to live on the banks of the river.

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