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Conference • NNHSH 2013 Theme: Transformations of Health Practices and Health Policies in the Nordic Welfare States
- 2013
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Proceedings (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- With the theme of the research conference of the NNHSH network we want researchers, both at doctoral and post-doctoral level, to reflect on how health practices and health policies in the Nordic Welfare States are being transformed and have been transformed in the past. The Nordic countries are all, more or less, in the midst of a transformation from a social democratic health care system, based on universal access for all citizens with no regard to their position, class or previous health practices, to a more neoliberal oriented health care regime with new - or perhaps in some ways very old - ideas about the body, health, and health care responsibilities. Sociologist S.N. Eisenstadt (1956) once suggested that the idea of "citizenship" in the development of a societal structure like the Western states of today served to establish a historically new position for individuals in preference to kinship and family status. Within different forms of government, such responsibilities are balanced differently between individual, family and state. For more than a century responsibility for health and healthiness in the Nordic countries has to a great extent been incumbent on the state. At the same time transformations of political ideologies have led to more pressure on individual - and familial - responsibilities. The conference aims at encouraging scholarly discussions highlighting the transformations of health politics in the Nordic countries and the consequences as observed and experienced by people in this context. Topics discussed can revolve around the role of governments in the furthering of transformations - be it regarding patient education, expectations of empowerment of the elderly in elderly care, or negotiations about the right to biological parenthood. It can also be about peoples´ embodied, verbalized and negotiated responses to the changes taking place. Furthermore, any health situation does not only concern patients or other people in need of care or help, but it also includes family-members as care providers, who may be drawn in to this role due to increasing expectations of kinship obligations and responsibilities.
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Conference • NNHSH 2014 Theme: Creative and able citizens: managing health and illness during the life course
- 2014
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Proceedings (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- As the Nordic welfare states evolve – with ideologies that focus on an increased consumption of health services – citizens are required to be productive throughout their life course. And because fewer economic resources are being invested into basic health care, and there is a move to shift more responsibility onto the individual (patient), it is becoming essential to illuminate practices that showcase the creative ways that people engage in self-care and agency in everyday-life. This conference aims to discuss how to develop new perspectives on health and illness in the Nordic welfare states. The emphasis will be on creativity and ableism as key elements in people’s and patients’ constructions of meaning, especially with regard to questions about health and rehabilitation. Among other things, the concept of creativity encompasses energy, liveliness, artfulness and agency – on both an individual and a collective level. Moreover, creativity refers to activities that are performed and practiced by able citizens and organisations. However, ableism is also a scholarly perspective that criticises traditional perceptions of normativity, particularly embodied normativity. The conference organisers would like to invite papers that critically examine the challenges and opportunities prompted by such creativity: What sort of creative practices do people apply to attain a good life for themselves while ill or frail? In what terms and under what circumstances are bodies perceived as being able – or not? How do such practices and attitudes affect people’s experiences and expressions of health and illness? How do we as researchers contribute to the articulation of creativity and ableism, and how do these concepts affect us as professionals and fellow human beings?
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Conference • NNHSH 2015 Theme: Encounters between Nordic health, welfare and the global: Challenges and possibilities
- 2015
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Proceedings (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- In a so-called globalized world characterized by the continuous movement of people and pathogens crossing national borders, the Nordic welfare states can, arguably, no longer be studied as isolated entities removed from their broader international and geopolitical context. For example, as was aptly illustrated by the 2009 swine flu outbreak, infectious diseases spread at a pace unmatched by previous pandemics. As such, disease has the potential to rapidly affect a large number of people in places as geographically distant as Mexico and Sweden. As a consequence, public health decisions and responses are made at both the UN- and at the national level, thus emphasizing how global interests have become deeply intertwined with national concerns. Moreover, travel does not only further the transmission of disease, but also affects how public health and welfare provision and responsibilities are managed locally. Globalization and neo-liberalism have, among other things, contributed to the reframing of health and welfare as matters of bio-security and border control, rather than merely reflecting issues of well-being and care. Such processes of exclusion and inclusion influence people’s health seeking-behaviours and leads, in turn, to increased social inequalities within changing Nordic welfare systems originally based on shared ideologies of “equality”. However, encounters between Nordic health, welfare and the global do not necessarily consist solely in changes or challenges in public health policies. Instead such meetings may take place in everyday interactions between for instance lay people, medical staff and the social services. To marginalised groups, such meetings may thus represent desired opportunities to improve health or living conditions.
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